Download 1 Table of Contents Preface 1 Part I 3 Chapter 1: Beginnings 4

Table of Contents
Preface
1
Part I
3
Chapter 1: Beginnings
4
Chapter 2: How to Build a Goat
9
Chapter 3: Behaving Appropriately
14
Chapter 4: Rewards and Risks
22
Chapter 5: Among the Goats
29
Part II
40
Chapter 6: Across the Continent
41
Chapter 7: Conservation: Local Challenges
54
Chapter 8: The Global Challenge
63
Epilogue
75
Acknowledgements
77
Suggested Reading
78
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Preface
Far above where most humans venture, where the upthrust peaks embrace the heavens, a
gentleman dressed in a shaggy white cloak roams the heights. Trimmed in beard, baggy pants,
black nose and stiletto horns, he rambles the ridge tops amidst blinding snow and biting wind,
where winter reigns half of the year. Perhaps the most extraordinary mountaineer to ever live,
this Old Man of the Mountains is America’s mountain goat.
I became interested in mountain goats as a student studying wildlife biology at the
University of Montana. That state’s mule deer, elk, pronghorn, moose, and bighorn sheep were a
beguiling assemblage of ungulates (hoofed animals) to this Michigan transplant. Then in 1971,
during a Thanksgiving Day weekend visit to the home of my college roommate’s parents in
Great Falls, I first made acquaintance with the mountain goat. Beholding an unblinking head
that austerely poked from the wall, I thought this was the most elegant beast that I had ever seen.
Twenty miles south of Missoula, Montana, and beyond sprawled the nearest population’s
retreat where I spent future weekends searching for the real thing. My fascination grew with
each sighting of these wind-racked apparitions, clinging to the ragged edge of the SelwayBitterroot Wilderness Area—at that time, the largest designated wilderness in the lower 48
states. Following a senior thesis of finding and counting them in winter, I fashioned a research
proposal for a graduate degree program. From 1973 to 1975, I tromped the glacially carved
canyons that spilled eastward from the crests of the Bitterroot Mountains to the river below.
Focused on the environmental bottleneck that most tests the goats, I spent three winters and
springs studying and marveling at their adaptations and behaviors so suited to life among the
peaks. Throughout a conservation career in which large mammals dominated my field studies,
again and again I returned to goat ranges in the U.S. and Canada to witness their high wire acts.
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Wildlife photography, much like scientific research, is often a solitary pursuit. Stalking
the animals with enough sensitivity to not alarm them, or better yet positioning oneself so the
animals find the viewfinder on their own, takes the kind of patience that only the mountain goat
may truly own. Capturing their images should not be rushed, in part because gravity happens
quickly. One fall that broke a bone and another swift trip I took down a slope in an avalanche
were reminders of the perils that the goats face daily.
Most of the photographs I’ve chosen for this book are from those Frigidaire months when
goats confront nature’s rigors with tenacity and grace. Gripping the grim limits of possibility,
this is among the continent’s most remarkable of inhabitants—a testament to nature’s abhorrence
of a biotic vacuum. Yet, despite the apparent security of its wilderness realm, America’s
mountain goat faces mounting challenges in a changing world. For no species lives far or deep
or lofty enough to escape the pervasive reach of humankind—not the polar bear, the whale, or
the eagle, not even the mountain goat.
By sharing these images, words, and my affection for the animal, my hope is to bring
greater appreciation and attention to this American athlete of the alpine.
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Part I
Like a ghost that drifts among clouds and cliffs, in defiance of gravity itself, abides this
improbable beast of the peaks. From the loftiest vantage of any large mammal on the continent,
it has watched the comings and goings of others over untold generations. This time-tested
perspective accords the Old Man of the Mountains some authority on success and failure and
what conditions render each. We may do well to take heed.
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Chapter 1: Beginnings
From American Indians, the Corps of Discovery first heard about a white beast that dwelt among
the peaks. They marveled at the shaggy hide purchased from Chinookan Indians along the
Columbia River. In 1805 Captain William Clark even glimpsed a live one, albeit at a great
distance, near what now is the Idaho-Montana border.
In 1778 Captain James Cook recorded the earliest hint of the creature’s existence.
During stops at British Columbia and Alaskan villages on his around-the-world voyage, he was
struck by the spun wool garments worn by the natives. When the Indians pointed out white
animals perched high on the rocks as the source of the garments’ wool, Cook called them polar
bears.
Others have confused the animal with mountain sheep that also occupy the continent’s
western mountains. Indeed the English translation of the mountain goat’s taxonomic genus,
Oreamnos, suggests as much—lamb of the mountains.
Others reckoned the beast bearing a shoulder hump and simple black horns as a new
variety of familiar species. In 1798, Alexander McKenzie described the animal he spotted in the
mountains near the McKenzie River as a white buffalo. Although albino bison do exist,
McKenzie’s arctic animal was likely the mountain goat.
It’s not hard to imagine how the early explorers, trappers, and fortune-seekers might find
the notion of a white buffalo roaming among the peaks as much reality as phantom or fable.
Some 25–50 million bison once roamed the continent and were well-known to most who
ventured west. Even in fiction, the taxonomy of this stout-shouldered creature was enigmatic. A
passage from The Big Sky, Pulitzer prize-winning author A.B. Guthrie’s yarn about the mountain
men of Montana, describes the mountain goat this way:
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It ain’t a buffler proper, nor a white antelope, neither, though you hear the name put to it
and a sight of others. They keep to the high peaks, they do, the tip top of mountains, in
the clouds and snow. … Not many’s seen a live one. A man has to climb some for that.
Native people of North America’s First Nations, of course, had known the animal for
centuries. Some hunted them for food, ceremonial items, and clothing. But well into the 20th
Century, these wilderness cliff-walkers were relatively untouched by the westward march of
Euro-Americans. It was an animal more of myth and mystery than avarice and thus escaped the
tsunami of exploitation suffered by the more easily targeted bison, pronghorn, deer, elk, and the
goat’s mountain cousin the bighorn sheep.
Along with its closest relatives that inhabit European and Asian peaks, the mountain goat
completes a distinct taxonomic grouping, the Rupicaprini Tribe (Rupes = rock, capra = goat),
within the sheep, goat, antelope, and cattle family (the Bovidae). The rupicaprids are regarded as
goat-antelopes. The members possess traits of both true goats and antelopes, but are neither.
Characteristic of the mountain goat and its relations—and distinguishing those species from
other members of the Bovidae family—are their thin-boned and fragile skulls, and short, daggerlike horns that look similar in both sexes.
The mountain goat’s rupicaprid relatives are the mysterious gorals and serows of Asia,
and the chamois of Europe. The total number of species depends upon which taxonomist you
ask, but there may be as many as four species of goral and between three and six species of
serows (see Walker’s Mammals of the World and Mammal Species of the World for species
accounts). Most authorities agree on two species of chamois—Rupicapra pyrenaica of the
Pyrenees and Apennine Mountains of France, Spain and Italy, and the more abundant Rupicapra
rupicapra of the Alps, Balkans, Asian Minor, and the Caucasus.
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The gorals (all of the genus Naemorhedus) are the most primitive rupicaprids and likely
the most similar in appearance to the ancestral form that gave rise to the modern tribal
descendants. The gorals are grayish or reddish, coarse-haired, short-horned, and most weigh 50–
75 pounds as adults. The species’ geographic range includes mountainous regions of eastern
Russia and China, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and possibly Laos. A population of the species
called the long-tailed goral occupies the Demilitarized Zone of the Korean Peninsula.
Also resident to Asian mountains and ranging from Siberia south across the Himalayan
region through Myanmar and Thailand to Malaya and Sumatra and are the serows, all of the
genus Capricornis. Resembling robust versions of gorals, they weigh up to 200 pounds and are
reddish brown to gray-brown in color. Leading even more secretive lives than the gorals, the
serows inhabit steep hillsides cloaked in dense vegetation. Isolated when the Japanese
archipelago broke from the Asian mainland, the Japanese serow is perhaps the best known of the
serows and gorals which are among the least studied of the world’s large mammals. Historic
ranges of gorals and serows have been reduced by excessive hunting and habitat loss. Several
species are now considered in danger of extinction.
The chamois, on the other hand, is the best known and studied among this small group of
mountain dwellers. Easily the fleetest of the bunch and a prodigious leaper, the chamois is
longer-legged and slimmer than other rupicaprids. Adults weigh 75 to100 pounds, are tawny to
reddish brown in color with distinctive white markings, and are more gregarious than their
rupicaprid relatives of Asia.
The rupicaprids likely evolved in the Himalayan Plateau region and are considered to be
more primitive than—seeming living ancestors of—the true goats and sheep. Their origins date
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back to the late Miocene Epoch and the tribe diversified into many species during the Pleistocene
(0.1–1.8 million years ago), though most did not outlive the Ice Ages.
From the most northerly distribution of the modern-day serow and goral, the ancestral
mountain goat crossed to the New World via the Bering Land Bridge during the Pleistocene—
perhaps 40,000 or more years ago, when ocean levels were 300 feet lower than today. Molecular
studies suggest a closer relationship between the mountain goat and another immigrant, the musk
ox (Ovibos moschatus), than other North American large mammals. Yet America’s goatantelope resembles no other beast of either the New or Old World. It’s an evolutionary novelty,
one of a kind.
In short, the mountain goat is a mountain-dwelling ruminant, physically adapted for rock
climbing and surviving arctic alpine weather. Although commonly called the Rocky Mountain
goat, I prefer American mountain goat (or just mountain goat) because Oreamnos americanus
inhabits the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges of North America, not just the Rocky Mountain
chain.
Now extinct but known from fossils found in caves of the American Southwest, the
smaller Oreamnos harringtoni is the only other recognized past or present member of the
mountain goat’s genus. Fossil evidence suggests that during the massive Wisconsin Glaciation,
both species of mountain goats survived only south of the continental ice sheet, even as far south
as California and northern Mexico. Yet recent DNA analyses indicate that northern British
Columbia and the Alaskan coast provided additional refugia in which goats persisted until the
Pleistocene ice melted away.
The periglacial conditions that shaped Oreamnos americanus are what the species
remains best adapted to today. It’s found from southern Alaska to the western Northwest
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Territories and southward through Canada to Washington, Idaho and Montana. Beyond this
distribution of native populations, new herds have been established by transplanting animals to
Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, central Montana, the Olympic Peninsula of
Washington, several Alaskan islands, and even beneath the granite gaze of four presidents in the
Black Hills of South Dakota.
<Insert Map of Distribution about here>
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Chapter 2: How to Build a Goat
The mountain goat is defined by the suite of traits that permit it to defy gravity twelve months a
year. Specialization starts with the feet. The hard outer walls of the hooves surround a rough yet
pliable, convex pad. The animal world’s equivalent of studded tires, the hoof pads conform to
rock surfaces providing posi-traction. The four "toes" (digits two and three comprising the
cloven hoof, and digits one and four being the elevated "dew claws" on the rear of the foot) are
oversize—a feature that affords a larger gripping surface and distributes the foot load for
increased support on snow. The cloven hoof is more flexible than in other ungulates. As the
goat descends a rocky face or steep snowfield, the toes spread apart improving balance and
providing friction in an outward as well as downward direction. During descents, the goat
lowers his hind quarters to reduce center of gravity and to bring the large dew claws into contact
with rock and snow, increasing traction and control.
His overall build includes short, stocky legs set relatively close together, and a compact
torso with the forequarters decidedly larger than the rear (a la McKenzie and Guthrie’s “white
buffler”). The heavily muscled shoulders and forelegs help him trudge through deep snow. A
compact body provides a low center of gravity, balance, and uncanny agility on narrow ledges
that vanish into thin air. When startled he may trot or lope, but this is not an animal built for
speed.
Although nimble in the mountains by hoofed animal standards, North America’s Dall,
Stone, and bighorn sheep (collectively called mountain sheep) possess neither the physical
adaptations nor the raw ability of the mountain goat on cliffs and crags. While sheep bound
crisply across outcrops and slopes, the goat is a plodder and inclined to stick to steeper terrain.
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Leverage, friction, and balance are the tools of his trade. The sheep are free-climbing
scramblers; the goat is a technician.
I've watched a goat climb to the top of a dizzying pinnacle and stand with all four feet
together on a summit measuring only eight inches square. Then he raised a hind foot, scratched
behind an ear, and shook the dust from his coat, unimpressed with the feat as I looked on in
wonder.
The goat’s outward appearance is marked by an extravagant robe of white. It’s from late
fall into spring that he looks his most elegant, highlighted by a full beard, pantaloons that
resemble baggy basketball shorts, and a dorsal ridge of hair that when backlit casts a radiant halo
befitting a beast living so close to the heavens. This outer pelage of 5 to 7-inch-long guard hair
sheds wind and snow and protects a dense insulating mantle of underfur (goats patented the
concept of layering for warmth!) as luxurious as the finest cashmere. To my eye, they are among
the most photogenic of subjects.
From May into August, goats metamorphose from this shaggy beast of winter into
trimmer summer attire. Often last to shed is the guard hair of the pantaloons, scraggly remnants
under the belly, and a goatee wisp of beard. With a fresh half-inch of wool adorning the rest of
the body, the American mountain goat looks far from chic, if not comical, as the molt progresses.
Only the Dall sheep of the far north shares an all white coat among ungulates. But unlike the
goat, the sheep’s closely-cropped summer appearance changes little during winter.
When the goats began to shed their too-warm-for-summer dress in spring, indigenous
peoples from Alaska to Washington plucked tufts of this fur found snagged on bushes. After
twisting the wool into yarn, they wove blankets and garments prized for their beauty, comfort,
and warmth.
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The white coat reflects solar radiation on summer days, enabling goats to remain in the
security of steep, exposed terrain, rather than seeking the coolness of forests. Still, on August
afternoons, they may retreat to the shade of cliffs or lounge on remnant snowfields to better
thermoregulate and ease the aggravation of insect pests.
The color of the coat is not truly white, but a buttery ivory that contrasts with the snow,
particularly when glistening in sunlight. Still, spotting these cliff-dwellers is challenging on a
mountainside smothered or patchily covered in snow. Amid driving rain, snow squalls, and
wind-driven graupel (all too common conditions on goat ranges), goats can vanish like ghosts in
a fog.
Because his coat is not waterproof, the lee side of outcrops, overhangs, and caves offer
refuge during particularly wet weather. Goat caves I've found in Montana's Bitterroot Range and
in Glacier National Park were carpeted with a layer of decomposing dung.
Finally, this creamy attire is highlighted by a coal black nose, eyes, and dagger-like horns
measuring 8 to11inches long in adults. The horns are neither the spiraled variety of true goats,
nor the dramatically curled and flared horns of mountain sheep. Still they serve as formidable
weapons when the head is lowered to face any would-be attacker. They also constitute a
prodigious reinforcement of an animal’s rank in the mountain goat’s social hierarchy. I’ll return
to this subject in the next chapter.
*****
A finely tuned specialist, America’s goat-antelope inhabits a realm where the vertical dimension
supersedes all others. My persistently cocked head and uplifted binoculars attested to that.
Although equipped with magnificent physical adaptations, the mental game is where goats may
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best excel. That became what I most admired during countless days watching these cliff walkers
negotiate their vertical world.
Rock climbing requires a combination of strength, skill, and confidence (can do attitude).
To successfully spend a ten- to twelve-year life span on cliffs requires one other ingredient:
patience. Natural selection and diligent parental training have given the mountain goat
remarkable patience. Goats "choose" their routes. Their climbing is methodical, even
painstaking. They are not averse to abandoning a route and seeking an alternative should the
footing turn treacherous. Goats can perform "walk-overs" when a cliff ledge narrows to
nothingness. A quick lurch to position his forefeet against the cliff face, followed by walking the
feet above the head across the rock, and he's ambling back along the ledge nibbling sedges and
groundsels.
While studying mountain goats in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains, again and again I was
amazed by their patience. High on the cliffs one winter day, I stalked a nanny I wanted to
immobilize with my dart gun and then radio-collar. I planned my stalk from the canyon bottom
to the ledge where she was feeding some 1,000 feet of elevation above me. An hour later, she
and I met on the ledge. Startled, she bounded out of sight before I could get off a shot. I waited
several minutes, then followed. Just beyond an angle in the cliff where the ledge ended in a 75
foot vertical drop, she stood facing me. I couldn't immobilize her there for fear she would
plummet from the ledge when she lost control of her limbs. So I retreated some 50 yards and sat,
dart gun ready, behind a boulder. Surely she would retrace her steps and I'd dart her as she
passed by. Three hours later, with the sun sinking into Idaho, my hands and feet numb, and my
patience played out, she remained at the same location. I bid her good night before descending
in the twilight. The next morning I spotted her grazing near the boulder where I had waited.
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I was once asked if I could come back to this world as an animal what kind would I
choose? “If you mean a mammal,” I replied, “I’d be a mountain goat.” Besides being able to
survive in those spectacular surroundings, I’d prize being granted that kind of patience.
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Chapter 3: Behaving Appropriately
The mountain goat is one of the ruminants—the even-toed, hoofed mammals with complex
stomachs where food is fermented by bacteria and protozoans to wring sparse nutrients from
plants. Their digestive efficiency permits mountain goats to eat a variety of coarse plants in
winter when the availability of nutritious green forage is limited in temperate and subarctic
regions. Although a specialist in many ways, the goat is a generalist in diet. Like most
adaptations, this is a behavioral trait born of necessity.
During much of the year—November into May—snow suffocates their world. On
canyon walls, where cliffs and crags face a southerly slanting sun, goats search the ledges and
slopes for sparse patches of food. Plants at the windward edges of ledges, where snow depths
are lesser, receive repeated heavy use winter after winter.
The specific composition of their catholic diet varies with snow depth, with stage of
growth or curing of each plant, and with plant composition across the mountain goat's
continental range. Like wooly veg-o-matics, they paw through snow for grasses and sedges,
nibble mosses and lichens from rocks, strip twigs from shrubs and trees, and sometimes dig the
rhizomes of ground-hugging plants. On some Rocky Mountain ranges of Colorado and
elsewhere, wind sweeps the snow from shreds of tall ridges and goats may outlast winter
nibbling on dwarfed alpine plants at sky-scraping elevations. In Alaska and British Columbia’s
coastal ranges—where snow piles higher than a house—goats descend far down the mountains
(even to the seashore) and strip lichens from ancient trees in the dark depths of winter. Wherever
they roam, mountain goats make do with what they can find. Winter is a period of energy
conservation and waiting—waiting for the season of renewal, waiting for spring.
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Although finding tasty plants likely enhances a mountain goat’s energy balance and
survival, filling one’s stomach is the first order of business when snow buries the land. I once
watched a nanny goat in a Bitterroot canyon mangle a seven-foot-tall serviceberry bush—a
preferred dietary shrub. All the lower branches, which would have been more tender and
nutritious than the thumb-thick main stem, had been stripped by past browsing. She mouthed the
main stem, twisted and tugged until finally she snapped it three feet above the ground. Then she
munched each of the lateral twigs and finally ate part of the coarse main stem. Consuming small
branches that have blown to the ground from ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees are other
instances where feeding efficiency wins out over searching and snow-plowing for more
digestible morsels. Such behavior promotes energy conservation by reducing time spent
foraging that burns the body’s precious fat stores.
*****
Goats live in a matriarchal society—a pecking order dominated by females that is common to
species as diverse as bees, bonobo chimps, and elephants. Adult females (called nannies)
command the highest social rank followed by subadults (yearlings and two-year-olds) and kids
(those less than a year old). Among nannies, social rank increases with age. This dominance
hierarchy is persistently reinforced with a complex repertoire of stares, postures, and threats—
escalating degrees of aggression—that are well-understood by all (see A Beast the Color of
Winter for behavioral details). And this aggression is not spread evenly among all individuals.
Adult nannies are by far the bossiest goats, as much as ten times more than adult males, who are
called billies.
Kids weigh just 35 to 50 pounds in winter (smaller than any other North American
ungulate during its first winter) which renders them lowest on the pecking order and challenged
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to travel and forage effectively in deep snow. A kid remains with its mother until its first
birthday (and sometimes until its second), nibbling food from the craters the nanny paws in the
snow, gaining a measure of warmth bedded beside her, and enjoying her steadfast protection
against carnivores seeking a meal of goat veal. Although the oldest and largest goats win most
social conflict encounters, kids fortuitously enjoy a measure of security from bullying by others
when tucked beside their domineering mothers.
This quite stable, age-linear, dominance hierarchy among bands of adult females, their
offspring, and subadults— commonly called nursery groups—is less predictable among males.
As juvenile males mature, they grow more aggressive and challenge even adult nannies on
occasion. As they reach about three years of age, males leave nursery groups and spend the
remainder of their lives wandering singly or in small bachelor groups. Among themselves, males
too establish and maintain a linear hierarchy based on social rank, largely related to their age and
increasing body size.
Except during the fall rut, billies interact little with nannies and nursery groups. When
they do, adult males—which easily outweigh all other members of the herd—appear conflicted
and often behave submissively. This response may be a product of their ritualized courtship
behavior in which males passively tend females and approach prospective mates with utmost
caution until females enter estrous and no longer rebuke their suitors’ advances.
On canyon cliffs in the depths of winter (December to April), I’ve watched females and
even subadults rebuff adult billies with a horn threat or even a charge when the males encounter
nursery groups. More often, mutual avoidance maintains personal space and order. Across
many goat ranges adult males occupy peripheral areas of the winter habitat. They more often use
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forested areas than others, whereas nannies seek out the more snow-free and secure feeding and
bedding crags.
In truth, the larger and more powerful billies (150 to 200 pounds compared to about 125
to 140 pounds for adult females in the lower 48 states, though as much as 50 percent larger to the
north) can handle deeper snow and don’t share the burden of nurturing offspring or nourishing a
growing fetus. What may appear as less optimal habitat may actually afford adult males more or
higher quality food. Males continue to gain structural size and body mass until seven or eight
years of age. Good nutrition can help a billy survive to old age, which boosts his social rank and
increases opportunities to breed and pass on his genes—the paramount pay-off of male
dominance. While males may select habitat that enhances nutrition, even at higher risk of
predation, females seek the security of steeper, more predator-free terrain, which presumably
enhances survival of their offspring.
As products of their local environment, as well as their genes, their sociability and use of
habitat are not immutably set in stone across their North American distribution. Where
populations occur at higher densities, and especially where goats congregate during summer at
natural salt licks (a limited and defensible resource) adult billies may be winners more often than
other goats during aggressive interactions. On goat ranges where densities are high, or food
occurs in larger patches (because terrain is less broken and steep), and again when goats gather at
mineral licks, group sizes of ten or more animals are not uncommon. This is the case on many
goat ranges of interior northern British Columbia and parts of Alberta. Yet coastal goat
populations of British Columbia and Alaska live a lifestyle in winter that’s more reminiscent of
their Asian relatives, the gorals and serows. Bound to pockets of steep country on densely-
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timbered slopes, they endure soggy snows of maritime winters in low density populations,
socializing in groups that average less than three animals.
Turning to native goat ranges south of Canada—which are broadly rugged, steep, and
lightly forested—group sizes tend to be small, averaging only two to three animals. In this
vertical world where soil’s a scarce commodity, food is spotty, and where life embraces cracks
and ledges, survival is tenuous. Competition for space is intense and personal space is welldefended.
Whereas goats stick to rugged terrain for security, more social ungulates use open
habitats with more continuous food patches, relying on foot speed and herding of animals as
protection from predators. Even in the loose associations of nanny and subadult groups—whose
members may be closely related—tolerance has its limits. Invading an adult nanny’s personal
space of six to ten feet often results in a threatening response, if only a ritualized posture that
translates as “back off.” The rich body language of goat society promotes avoidance of physical
contact and especially stabs from those potentially lethal horns. In over 95 percent of all contests
observed in both Canadian and American behavioral studies, goats were able to decide whose
rank and personal space was preeminent without resorting to physical contact.
Beyond the danger of puncture wounds, aggressive interactions may cause other injury to
the white climbers. In 4,400 hours of observing goats in northwest Montana, Douglas Chadwick
recorded almost 300 agonistic encounters between goats on steep terrain. Of thirty-nine
encounters in which goats fell or lost their footing, eighteen goats were “…directly pushed,
prodded or knocked over the edge; eighteen others were forced to make a frantic leap to escape
and lacked adequate footing to land on; and the remainder were either innocent bystanders
bumped off a ledge by battling goats, or a case of the aggressor slipping in haste.”
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My observations in the Bitterroots showed that goats’ intolerance for sharing their
personal space escalated with the steepness of terrain. I gasped as goats sometimes forced others
off narrow ledges in falls up to twenty vertical feet, with no apparent harm. But even goats can
sometimes make unforced errors, as in the deaths of five animals that Ernest Thompson Seton
observed fall to their deaths from a dead-end ledge.
Compared with other North American hoofed mammals, mountain goat society appears
unruly. In Alberta, biologists Francois Fournier and Marco Festa-Bianchet learned that adult
nannies typically take part in three to four conflicts with other goats per hour. By comparison,
the more socially well-adjusted bighorn sheep—which live on nearby mountains—will clash just
once every two to three hours during the rutting season when aggression is highest.
Despite appearances, I believe this system of well-ordered and measured belligerence has
evolved over the millennia to serve mountain goats well. A social structure typified by constant
threats, bluff charges, and sporadic clashes limits group sizes and competition for prime feeding
sites in a vertical world where food is spotty—mere snacks on precarious shelves. This spacing
of animals across rugged real estate prevents a population from over-using its food supply and
forestalls stress and disease that can accompany over-crowding.
During summer and fall, aggression relaxes—the consequence of abundant food, less
environmental stress, and goats using less precipitous terrain. Where topography permits,
Canadian scientists Steeve Côté and Marco Festa-Bianchet suggest that larger groupings of goats
may serve as an anti-predator strategy. More eyes and ears guard against a sneak attack by a lion
or wolf; and the intimidation effect of a crowd dissuades all but the most resolute carnivore.
Regardless the relative abundance of predators or risk of predation on mountain goat ranges,
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greater social tolerance facilitates more animals to forage on prime feeding sites to nourish their
young and recover body condition for the upcoming winter.
At its core, the goat is both product and captive of its evolutionary history and
specialization as a mountain climber. But the specifics of these cliff dwellers’ habitat use and
social behavior are attuned to the vicissitudes of the seasons and which rocks they roam.
*****
Mountain goats are polygamous, meaning males may breed several mates; but they do not gather
harems like elk do, for example. Individuals first become sexually active when they reach 2 ½
years of age—but may not breed until a year or two older—whereas many other North American
ungulates first mate as yearlings or two-year-olds. Beginning in November and through early
December, billies search for females. Older males court females by forming consort pairs. Each
may “tend” one or more nannies one at a time, defending each from other males until she
becomes receptive to his advances. While tending a female not yet in estrus, a billy spends much
time simply watching over her and feeding very little. Younger males may seek breeding
opportunities by chasing, or “coursing,” females. But this is rarely successful behavior as
dominant males drive off the upstarts and females may not accept them.
In romance too, patience is virtuous. Submissive posturing is good manners as billies
cautiously approach and sniff females to determine their reproductive status. Females not in
estrus will threaten or charge their suitors once their personal space of six to ten feet is violated.
Patience not only is chivalrous, but may avert a painful poke from a nanny’s rapier headgear.
Rutting pits dug by males are a ritualized aspect of courtship behavior. After pawing the
ground, a billy will sit like a dog in the shallow depression and paw soil onto his hind quarters
and belly. Accordingly, breeding age males are distinguishable by their dirty coats. Males also
21
rub their horns against vegetation where sticky secretions from the crescent-shaped horn glands
advertise a billy’s presence.
Like so much of the mountain goat’s hard-wired behavior, displays of size and social
status, rather than outright conflict involving contact, are customary between competing males.
Contrary to mountain sheep and most species of true goats that battle head to head, mountain
goats circle anti-parallel so that horn strikes are most often landed in the hind quarters or flanks.
Natural selection has countered this hazardous behavior by growing a dermal shield over the
goat’s hind quarters. This tough area of skin may reach an inch in thickness.
Nonetheless, their horns can be lethal weapons with instances recorded of dead goats
bearing a dozen or more puncture wounds. These could result from male combat or from a
nanny’s retaliation of an unwelcome suitor’s inappropriate advances. In a mating system in
which males submissively court and dutifully tend females, experience favors those who have
learned proper protocol. In one study researchers found that 91percent of females were bred by
high ranking, older males.
With mating accomplished, females, their kids, and subadults travel to favored areas of
winter range. Males wander off to spend much of winter solitarily or in small bachelor groups.
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Chapter 4: Rewards and Risks
With a life spent living on ledges and peaks come both rewards and risks. Few other hoofed
mammals spend significant time where the mountain goat roams, finding life easier on more
forgiving terrain. During my observations I found that only mule deer and more rarely elk
shared the Bitterroot haunts of mountain goats. In other goat ranges, mountain sheep also
overlap their distribution and may vie for forage. But of all North America’s large herbivores,
the mountain goat and musk ox exist most freely from interspecific competition for food and
space—a reward of sorts of their desolate domains.
Likewise, most predators lack the tenacity or mountaineering skills to hunt this surefooted climber. Those that occasionally kill goats are bears, wolves, mountain lions, and even
wolverines and eagles. Where predation has been quantified, grizzlies and wolves are the most
significant predators of goats. In an Alberta study, kids and yearlings were most vulnerable.
On thin ledges, bears and wolves are not much of a threat. But where goats stray from
steep terrain, and especially where heaps of wet snow force them to descend to coastal Alaska
and British Columbia’s old growth forests, bears and wolves more readily dine on mountain goat
fare.
The mountain lion is large and powerful enough to bring down the white mountaineer,
and the predator most often found prowling its rugged terrain. As lion numbers have increased
in recent decades, predation on goats may also have risen.
The 15-pound golden eagle, on the other hand—though a fierce hunter of smaller
mammals and birds—seems unsuited for killing prey the size of goats. Indeed, it picks its targets
carefully, seeking young kids to carry away or to strike and knock from cliff ledges. After
23
gravity has done its work, the eagle feeds on its fallen victims below the cliffs. Bald eagles have
also attacked young goats.
To counter the eagle, nannies tuck their young beneath them when the large bird soars
overhead. Even the shadow of a raven or red-tail hawk may cause a mother to shield a newborn
beneath her body with those stiletto horns held at the ready. This protective behavior of nannies
probably limits the vulnerability of kids, unless they are unguarded. The consensus from
ecological studies suggests that eagle predation is of limited consequence to the wellbeing of
goat herds.
The most common predator on many goat ranges south of Canada is the coyote, and this
was true of the Bitterroots as well. Most often I spotted them coursing terrain below the cliffs,
mousing or seeking the remains of winter-killed goats to scavenge. During February 1974, I
peered anxiously through my spotting scope as one harassed a nanny and kid. The coyote
repeatedly attempted to dissociate the pair by seemingly challenging the nanny to charge. When
the nanny dropped her headgear into assault position and obliged, the coyote dashed aside and
cut behind her. Nevertheless, she recovered each time to chase the coyote from her kid and
eventually routed him. In another instance, a pair of coyotes confronted a nanny and kid on the
narrowest stretch of ledge. The nanny stood over her youngster and simply waited the coyotes
out. Patience and perseverance again proved defining traits of the mountain goat.
When it comes to self-defense, the mountain goat is clearly no pushover against even
larger adversaries than the coyote. Observations by Steeve Côté and colleagues at Caw Ridge,
Alberta, evidenced goats escaping attacks by grizzly bears, wolves, and a wolverine. In one
misfire, an adult wolf successfully grabbed a three-month-old kid from a group of 52 goats that
were feeding on gentle terrain. The kid’s mother immediately charged the wolf. After she struck
24
him in the hindquarters twice, the wolf apparently reassessed the situation and released the kid
unharmed.
*****
As limited as the threat of predation in their vertical world may be, this has not dulled the white
climber’s attentiveness to danger. Mountain goats have evolved patterned behaviors that
enhance security on the cliffs, as Montana goat researcher Douglas Chadwick explained:
"The normal activities of mountain goats are interspersed with behavior patterns that
have developed as anti-predator devices. These include: the habit of raising the head to
look around at intervals while feeding, a proclivity for walking on the outside edges of
ledges and overhanging snow cornices to gain a better view of the situation below,
pausing on high vantage points during feeding and travelling to gaze for long periods of
time and test the wind before going on, the selection of bedsites that overlook the
landscape and have a high wall behind them, a routine of carefully surveying their
surroundings for several minutes before bedding down, and rising and turning every half
hour or so to scan the terrain anew and then re-bedding to face a different direction than
before (though this is probably for the sake of relieving stiffness too)."
But starvation in winter and the mountains themselves may claim more goats than do
predators. The drain of deep snow on foraging success, severe weather’s effects on newborn
survival, and inevitable accidents that accompany a life defying gravity take a cumulative toll on
these cliff dwellers.
During my three years in the Bitterroots I found the remains of twelve goats that had
died. Three I found at the base of cliffs where falls or snowslides may have deposited them. But
due to scavenging or advanced decomposition, I couldn’t be sure of the reason that any had met
25
their end. They averaged 10.8 years of age at death, with females ranging from 8.5 to 13.5 and
males from 6.5 to 15.5. The smaller body and bones of young animals makes it less likely that
their remains would survive in the mountains for long. Yet my population surveys showed that
kids (31 percent) and secondly yearlings (23 percent) suffered the highest annual losses from
natural causes—a pattern also noted by every other biologist who has studied the animal.
Protracted winters can take a much higher toll when more than half of all kids may not reach
their first birthday.
Although an 18-year-old female and a 14-year-old male were reported from a collection
of 165 skulls in a Canadian museum, most field studies concur that goats rarely surpass 12 or 13
years of age in the wild. A two-decade study of an unhunted goat herd at Alberta’s Caw Ridge
found that annual survival (the probability of animals surviving for one year) was 94 percent for
females aged two through nine but just 76 percent after age nine. Throughout their lives, nannies
had a better chance than billies of surviving each year once they had reached one year of age.
Female goats tended to outlive males—a life history characteristic of most large mammals.
Many of the skulls I examined at taxidermy shops of goats ten and older had severely
worn, loose, or missing incisiform teeth (the six incisors and two incisor-shaped canines at the
front of the lower jaw used for clipping vegetation). Others had chipped incisors, possibly
products of climbing accidents. Bad teeth compromise foraging efficiency—a goat’s ability to
clip grasses and twigs and peel plant morsels from rocks and crevices. Along with debilitating
injuries, failing teeth limit the maximum lifespan of most large mammals. Thus, mortality of
goats from natural causes follows the general mammalian pattern of higher mortality for both
juvenile and very old individuals with relatively low death rates for prime breeding-aged adults.
26
While the unforgiving conditions of their mountain retreat shielded mountain goats from
the 19th century Euro-American decimation of much western wildlife, there is a price to pay for
this security. Throughout its western range observers recount that even this ace of alpinists is
subject to missteps and tumbles. I once watched in horror as a nanny and kid while attempting to
turn around both fell fifteen feet from a dead-end sliver of ledge. The kid landed upright,
unharmed; but the nanny crashed back first onto a juniper bush, inflicting a nasty wound on her
foreleg. This is a cost of a life on steep rocks, where security and danger are oddly intertwined.
Douglas Chadwick’s painstaking observations of mountain goats in northwestern Montana
showed that 80 percent of all climbing accidents brought on by social aggression among goats
were suffered by kids and yearlings.
As a measure of injury suffered from social aggression and climbing accidents, I
measured horn breakage in a sample of 123 Bitterroot goats harvested by hunters from 1973
to1978. On 30 percent one or both horns were broken. However, 70percent of all horn breakage
had occurred by the time goats had reached 3.5 years old. As with Chadwick’s observations, this
suggests that younger goats are more vulnerable to falls. Experience, strength, and senior
position in the social hierarchy may all buffer older animals from becoming casualties of the
mountain itself—but only if they survive long enough.
*****
Life among the crags exposes goats to the howling, skull-numbing gales of winter, but as we’ve
seen, these Ice Age survivors are physically and behaviorally adapted to such conditions. Yet
when snow buries the mountain, the search for sparse food tests and weakens even the toughest,
particularly in years when winter drags far into spring. Failing nutrition of half-the-year winters
is among the risks of living yearlong in their kingdom of white.
27
In April I found goats probing the lowest elevations of the Bitterroot canyons. That’s
when the first sprigs of bluegrass and buttercups greened the south-facing slopes where winterweary goats had spent the past six months. This was the good news that marked their release
from a nutritionally-deficient subsistence. Highly-digestible, protein-rich new growth halted the
decline of body condition and was essential for pregnant nannies to bear a new generation in
need of rich milk. Yet early spring was a time marked by the bad and the ugly, as well as the
good.
Late snow storms cheat spring by burying any flush of new growth, a circumstance that
could push some malnourished animals over the edge. More forcefully spring can be the most
treacherous time of year for young and old, male and female alike. This is the season of the
ugly, of thundering avalanches. When conditions are right, the sliding of snow is an awesome
spectacle on goat winter ranges. During the day, exposed rock absorbs solar energy and melts
adjacent snow, which flows and freezes under large snowfields. Fluctuation of temperatures
around the freezing point causes slabs of snow, both small and immense, to slide off ledges,
crash over cliffs, and plunge down debris chutes, carrying ice, rock, and trees along for the ride.
This would seem a bad time to live on a cliff.
In fact, the shedding of snow by the mountains is both a blessing and a curse.
Avalanches expose new patches of food to hungry goats; but they may also be a significant cause
of mortality. Many researchers have found the battered remains of goats in avalanche debris.
The carcasses serve as carrion for bears, coyotes, ravens, and other scavengers.
Goats live in a noisy environment: wind, running water, and persistent rockfall are the
white noise of the cliffs. Goats often pay little attention to such sounds as they are as normal as
28
ocean breakers on a beach. But when an avalanche rumbles down the mountain, goats scramble
against rock walls or duck under cliff overhangs. Their panic is palpable.
Thus, the Old Man of the Mountains pays a price for his precarious security. This
paradox of his niche reminds me of a description in Wild Delicate Seconds of seventeen snowy
owls that Charles Finn watched serenely perched on fence posts one wintry day: “Resigned to
the vagaries of fate and hopeful about the carelessness of mice, they were waiting out their
portion of eternity with exceptional calm.” Substituting the words “carelessness of winter” for
“carelessness of mice,” renders an apt description of the mountain goat’s life.
The hoary marmot, a twelve-pound rodent with which the mountain goat's distribution
most closely coincides, avoids the perils of winter by hibernating from October to June. Far
beneath winter's white blanket he burns stored fat manufactured from last summer's crop of
glacier lilies and sheep fescue. He never hears the avalanches that thunder down the mountains
as the goats hunker against the cliffs.
After marmots emerge from eight months of slumber and goats roam to the high cirques
and ridges of their range, both feast upon giant salad bowls of nutrient-rich grasses, sedges,
groundsels, and other alpine delicacies. These two species have prospered on the summits with
differing lifestyles, yet both are distinctively harmonized with the mountains’ vicissitudes.
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Chapter 5: Among the Goats
During three decades of field studies of North America’s large mammals, the environmental and
logistical challenges of none—not deer, elk, moose, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, or bears—
compared with those I encountered learning about the mountain goat. The gorges and ramparts,
the remoteness and weather are both physically and mentally taxing. Other field biologists have
discovered the same, some under the harshest of conditions or across expanses of time.
Stewart Brandborg was among the first to observe and record details of the mountain
goat’s life. From 1947 through 1952, he surveyed the animal across a swath of its Montana and
Idaho distribution. Douglas and Beth Chadwick spent three winters (1972 to 1974) encamped on
a bleak goat range near Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. With remarkable diligence, they
recorded the behavior and fortunes of several bands of white climbers during the yearly ice age.
For a dozen years, Douglas Houston, Bruce Morehead, and a cadre of colleagues studied the
introduced goats of Olympic National Park, where controversy swirled around their exotic but
charismatic status. And beginning in 1989 Marco Festa-Bianchet, Steeve Côté, and associates
initiated the longest-running study of the animal’s ecology and behavior at Alberta’s Caw Ridge.
Others too, from Alaska to Colorado, have toiled and delighted to better understand the goat’s
unique existence so that it might remain an enduring wilderness icon.
My own efforts began with forays into Bitterroot canyons out of curiosity about the
animal. During that first winter of 1972-73, I often pitched my pup tent miles up some desolate
gash in their granite stronghold. Single-digit temperatures and snowbound landscapes are
incomparable instructors. Stuffing my compact gas stove in the sleeping bag along with my
boots—so that the former might persuade the cold-hearted gadget to heat water for a breakfast of
30
tea and instant oatmeal and the latter might forestall frostbitten toes—were lessons quickly
learned in wilderness bushcraft.
But backpacking winter camps gobbled time that detracted from finding the subjects I
sought to study. So in fall 1973, my graduate program advisor Dr. Bart O’Gara and I hauled a
slide-in camper into Fred Burr Canyon. We off-loaded it near the end of a crude track that had
been excluded from inclusion when the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area was demarcated in
1964. Though a mere seven feet long and just four feet high, the camper provided a solid roof
over my head, a cot, propane space heater, and two-burner stove. It served as operational center
and refuge for me, and for the shrews that relentlessly infested the place. From this base camp, I
conducted my research in Fred Burr and adjacent canyons, each of which supported herds of a
handful to three dozen of the Bitterroots’ native mountaineers. This was the backdrop for the
final two years of my modest contribution to our understanding of this mystical beast’s life on
the rocks.
*****
From repeated observations, I came to recognize certain goats in Fred Burr and other canyons.
Unique horn characteristics identified some individuals. One I named Captain Hook for the
sharply curved horns that graced the crown of this particularly robust billy. Another was Nubs,
who I first observed in 1973 as a yearling. Both her horns were broken and round knobs had
formed on the stubs. In my third year of observation, and her third year of life, she bore her first
puffball kid.
In Fred Burr I supplemented my behavioral observations of Nubs, Captain Hook, and
several distinctive others with three animals I radio-instrumented. Many researchers have
captured and marked mountain goats, often with radio-collars, to monitor their movements to
31
seasonal ranges and to determine if they return to ranges in successive years (behavior termed
range fidelity). I was one of those biologists and tried two techniques to capture animals.
In November 1973, I constructed two Clover traps—a cage trap originally designed by
wildlife biologist Melvin Clover in the 1950s to capture deer, one at a time. Each was a steelframed enclosure draped in heavy jute netting that measured 7 feet by 3 feet by 4 feet high. At
one end was a door that could be raised and connected to a trip line inside, which would trigger
the door to drop behind it when a goat entered the trap. I somehow convinced college friends to
help haul each of these—one completely constructed, the other in pieces (a much less grueling
and dangerous choice, as it turned out)—1,000 vertical feet up the goat cliffs of Fred Burr
Canyon. We placed salt blocks at favored bedding sites and after several weeks, I returned to
place the Clover traps over the salt blocks, assuming this had given the goats enough time to
become hooked on sodium chloride.
Across many goat ranges the animals are habituated to natural salt licks and seeps.
Mineral licks in British Columbia draw animals as much as 15 miles on traditional trails that
traverse vast forested lands. The most famous may be the Walton Goat Lick on the southern
border of Montana’s Glacier National Park. There, dozens of the park’s goats make daily
pilgrimages in late spring and summer to slake their taste for naturally concentrated salt on a
steep bank above the Flathead River. Formerly they made harrowing crossings of Montana’s
State Highway 2 to access the mineral lick, creating a hazard for them and for motorists. In 1981
reconstruction of the highway incorporated two underpasses, which Glacier’s goats readily
adopted as passageways to the Walton Goat Lick.
Unlike Glacier Park and some other goat ranges, the Bitterroots were not born of
sedimentary rock containing carbonates and other salt concentrations, but rather granitic stone of
32
igneous origin. No natural lick sites occurred. Although I sometimes saw goats licking the
underside of ledges, they may have been doing so to sip water or scrape crustose lichens from the
rock. Across the Bitterroot Valley in the Sapphire Mountains, another goat researcher trapped
animals at a natural lick that he supplemented with hauled-in blocks of salt. He had considered a
study area in the Bitterroots, but abandoned that choice due to the inhospitable terrain and lack of
goat-attracting salt sites. As it turned out, the Bitterroot goats cared not enough about salt to
enter my Clover traps.
My backup plan was to stalk goats in winter, sneaking close enough to inject them with a
muscle immobilizing drug shot from a dart gun. Rather than capture them in summer, when the
weather is more agreeable even at 8,000 to 10,000 feet elevation, I chose the depths of winter.
Winter was when goats retreated to discreet ranges of the Bitterroots’ many canyons.
My world was the canyon bottoms, each of which was followed by a rock-strewn Forest
Service trail; their world loomed 600 to 1,500 feet above the streams grinding away the cliffs’
foundations. It was a given that each attempt to capture animals would require mountaineering
skills matching those of my quarry—an obvious conclusion from my first sighting of Bitterroot
goats, three white specks clinging to a granite wall. The trick was to spot an animal in a place
where I could approach it. The mountain goat’s inborn allies of discretion and patience became
mine as well.
In over two dozen attempts to dart Bitterroot goats, I succeeded in capturing but three.
After several painstaking, out-of-sight stalks, my quarry had sometimes vanished from lofty
perches where I’d spotted them an hour or more earlier. More often, a round-about approach
across couloirs and thin ledges found my objective in a place where I dare not squeeze the
33
trigger. Had I done so a magnificent beast may have plunged to its death once the immobilizing
drug took effect.
*****
Sometimes accompanied by fellow graduate students or friends, but most often alone in the
wilderness canyons, I chose a constant companion for my second winter in the wilderness. A
mirror image of the cliff-dwellers I admired, I brought a Samoyed pup on his first trip to my
winter camp when he was but 14 weeks old. I named him Kamook, translated as dog from the
language of the Chinook Tribe from whom Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had acquired
their mountain goat hide. A breed bred for Arctic conditions, the fifty-five degree temperature of
my cramped camper proved too toasty for him. Kam preferred burrowing outside in the snow,
and then pawed at the door for his breakfast when I stirred to brew coffee.
At the age of four and a half months he began trailing me up the goat cliffs. Not always
fond of the places I scrambled to capture goats or to measure their feeding preferences, I
sometimes had to boost my timid companion up steep pitches.
I once descended an icy outcrop to a broad ledge 30 feet below and found myself alone.
Kamook, the wonder pup, protested pitifully from a bleak slice of mountain above. No
encouragement could convince him that his life was not in peril. So I rock-climbed back up to
where he paced and whimpered. We were still 500 hundred feet up the mountain; night was
closing in; and there was no better route down. With a length of parachute cord I kept stashed in
my rucksack, I cinched a loop behind his front legs. His look told all: the end must be near.
Despite his protestations, I lowered him down, loosed the cord and followed after. Wonder pup
was never quite as trusting of me on the cliffs after that.
34
On the rare occasions he saw them, the goats were mysterious, even intimidating to Kam.
During the one stalk with him that ended in success, he remained a safe distance and watched
while I adorned the nanny with a radiocollar.
*****
From late December through April, the goats’ lives settled into a fairly predictable routine of
feeding, bedding, and scanning their domain. My life mimicked this simple pattern: feeding,
bedding, and observing goats. The difference was that my surveillance required burning heaps
of calories to hike or snowshoe (depending on conditions) to find them, making counts of
animals in each canyon, and recording their distributions and behaviors. Kam would have been
satisfied to stay closer to home—covering just the 5-mile stretch of winter range in Fred Burr
Canyon. But, oh no, his owner just had to venture elsewhere. So a day in Bear Canyon or
Blodgett Canyon meant a trek out of Fred Burr, a drive to a trailhead, an eight-mile roundtrip
trek into another canyon, then a return slog to our Fred Burr camp. An occasional night in the
twelve-foot travel trailer of friends at the mouth of Fred Burr canyon saved trudging home in the
dark.
Back at camp, a hearty meal of canned or dried goods was followed by reviewing and
polishing the day’s notes, a cup of cocoa, and sleep as profound as I’ve ever known.
Occasionally the goats would visit me as I snuggled in my sleeping bag. They clattered up steep
pitches as I watched in wonder, or poised on precipices with wind in their coats while surveying
their wild domain.
*****
The annual cycle of the mountain goat begins with the birth of offspring on winter ranges during
late May and early June—a period that found me locating their kidding areas or camped on the
35
cliffs to closely observe postpartum behavior. After a six-month gestation, a nanny will isolate
herself from others and produce a single young, or rarely twins. Kids are born in particularly
rugged, steep terrain, probably as an anti-predator strategy. From the moment of birth, their
surroundings are vertical. This leaves a lasting impression of the way their environment should
be oriented.
Newborn kids weigh just six to seven pounds, but are highly precocious. Barely an hour
after its birth, I watched a kid stuggling to follow its mother across a fellfield. On unsteady legs,
he wobbled and tottered. His mother patiently waited each time the infant faltered and fell
behind, sometimes returning to offer nudging encouragement. Being born into such
surroundings means more than a few bumps on the chin, but predators are relatively few on the
cliffs and nannies are doting mothers. When moving across steep slopes, nannies often position
themselves just downslope of their kids, presumably to protect against miscues by their
youngsters.
Newborns quickly gain strength. Within a week or two of birth, the spring migration to
summer range begins as winter’s grip weakens.
Now nearly seven months old, Kam was big and strong enough to accompany me during
a summer and fall in the high country. That’s what I intended. But the wilderness has a way of
swallowing up life. On our first trip in late-June, he vanished while following me across a log
that spanned a snowmelt-swollen torrent.
As swiftly as a misstep on ice-glazed granite or an avalanche sweeps away a guiltless
mountain goat, my wilderness companion was gone. My efforts failed to find him that day.
Inquiries at local households, the animal shelter, and newspaper could not bring him back. That
summer was more solitary than I had expected, even when an occasional friend joined me on the
36
summits. Only the goats and other wild alpine residents offered solace with any constancy. So I
focused on that isolated assemblage of animals that persevere in near anonymity to those who
live so far below.
*****
I spent June to mid-October of 1974 backpacking in 150 square-miles of high-country
wilderness. The purpose was to follow the goats’ wanderings which greatly expanded in
summer across the Bitterroots’ sprawling subalpine and alpine zones. For five to seven days of
each week I bounded the lengths of interfluvial ridges to the sky-scraping cirques and crests.
These spiny ridges are united, like tines of a pitchfork, by the Bitterroot divide where Montana
meets Idaho. Beyond to the west sprawled an immense jade sea of forest broken by rock and
snow and nose-bleed crags. There, other goat herds wandered, as did some of the Bitterroot
canyon animals I watched in winter.
Mountaineering agreed with me. Despite 65 pounds strapped on my back, rambling
across talus and ragged ridges became as natural as breathing alpine air. As I learned the ropes
of field research, I fancied the self-reliance that wilderness demanded, without as much as a
walkie-talkie for support (cell phones were not yet thought of). Where generations of surefooted goats fattened and raised their kids, my bones might go undiscovered for decades.
Camped beside stately larch and ancient whitebark pines, snowmelt trickled past my tiny
tent’s door. A mantle of stars sometimes made me fight off sleep until immense fatigue
prevailed. Surely this too was reward for the mountain goat, living at the roof of the world.
Some evenings I reconstituted freeze-dried meals on gaily-flowered shorelines of Pearl,
Totem, or dozens of other unnamed lakes. Those liquid gems pocked lofty basins, where silvery
sentinels shimmered across their midnight waters. A twilight plunge into forty-degree depths left
37
me refreshed, with fifteen hours of sweat scoured from skin and scalp. As onrushing storm
clouds swallowed the failing alpenglow, I’d watch a nanny and kid or a stout billy nibble sprigs
of St. John’s-wort en route to their sheltering, cliffside bedsites.
I’ve never felt more vulnerable and puny than when a storm bore down while I was
exposed near treeline and miles from anyone. The static electricity that prickled my skin and
twisted the hair on my arms into punk hairdos foretold the gathering electrons of a close
lightning strike. More than once I shed my camera and lenses, spotting scope and tripod, and
sprinted some distance away, only to see and hear a thunderbolt batter the ridge nearby, leaving
the acrid reek of splintered granite searing my eyes and nose. At such moments I wondered if
those same lightning strikes didn’t occasionally clobber a goat, though I’ve not read any reports
of it. But then much of their lives remain unknown to us. Such mysteries of nature are what
draw inquisitive minds to the realm of the mountain goat.
Summer is a time of plenty when meadows explode in vibrant color. On a banquet of
nutritious grasses, sedges, and forbs, goats recover from the previous winter, produce milk to
nurse young, and lay on fat for the coming winter. The goats focused like lasers on the new
growth that’s most readily converted to muscle and milk. In early summer this lush fare was
ubiquitous, popping forth in the wake of melting snow. As the days shortened toward fall, prime
foraging sites grew more sparse and spare and the goats travelled more.
Mostly from high vantage points, I found them and watched their activities. But
occasionally, after cresting a ridge, they were far closer, offering a chance to record their feeding
or snap a photograph. As I eavesdropped on mountain goats, other alpine fauna sometimes filled
my spotting scope’s field of view. Pikas, hoary marmots, and sometimes regal elk, plus
American pipits and rosy finches constituted this hardy, high-living community. Twice I was
38
treated to sightings of wolverines. One coursed with boundless energy through a confusion of
boulders on a quest for a meal of marmots.
My closest encounters with mountain goats had been on steep winter range, where secure
locations or energy conservation may have overcome their instincts to flee. Those meetings
were also testament to these animals’ trusting and curious nature. Sometimes they allowed me to
slowly approach; other times I’ve had inquisitive animals check me out—even though these were
hunted herds. One billy I met on a snow-slicked Bitterroot escarpment seemed way too
interested. When he stiff-leggedly advanced to within about eight feet, then stomped a front
foot, I folded my tripod and warily backed away.
But my closest encounter with a wild mountain goat was the one that stepped on me.
High in the Bitterroots in July I was scrambling across the ledgework skirting a picturesque
cirque basin. Suddenly I spotted a nanny some 100 yards off to my left. She was watching me
from a shelf slightly lower than mine. I was at a spot where my ledge was some four or five feet
wide, with drop-offs below and above, so I unshouldered my pack, set up my tripod and camera,
and prepared to capture some photos of the nanny. Just as I pressed my eye to the viewfinder, a
kid goat bounded from my right and never slowed as it passed by. Much to my surprise, one
hoof landed on my outstretched leg. Much to my disappointment, when I pulled up my pant leg
the hoof had left no mark. Minutes later the kid was bumping its mother’s belly for a drink of
warm milk, but not before I’d snapped its picture shortly after the tyke had landed on me.
*****
Summer fades in September. Needles of alpine larch change from lime to gold, then drop,
leaving naked skeletal limbs until next May. As the grasses and wildflowers cure and store their
carbohydrate reserves in roots, goats seek any remaining greenery where the nourishing moisture
39
from remnant snowfields and seeps irrigate plants. Animals may still gain or at least not begin
losing body weight by selecting the most nutrient-dense, digestible forage.
Billies range more widely in late October in search of females. The fall migration
precedes or coincides with the November breeding season. Some goats followed the long ridges
between drainages from the high country to cliffs 2,000–3,000 feet lower along the eastern half
of canyons. Others descended to creek bottoms and crossed to the opposite south-facing canyon
slopes—behavior registered by their tracks in fresh snow or from the electronic pathways I
gleaned from radiocollar signals. The first heavy snows that often precipitated the downward
migration also flushed me from the heights back to the lower canyons—the winter asylum of the
mountain goat.
40
Part II
It would be satisfying to leave you with this blithe image of North America’s alpine athlete, or
regale you with more stories about the life it lives, the feats it performs, or my own experiences
among the beast. But as a scientist and conservationist, there is more to the animal’s story to tell.
Across its range, even the reclusive mountain goat shares its prospects with others, including us,
Homo sapiens, the most numerous vertebrate species of all. Just as yearling goats must coexist
among bossy nannies, the heavy hand with which we rule the land means that mountain goats
have faced, and will increasingly face, challenges fitting into a human-dominated world.
So in the following chapters I explore our influence on the animal and its wild realm. My
hope is that we learn from the past—what both science and conscience instruct—and make
allowance for Oreamnos americanus tomorrow.
41
Chapter 6: Across the Continent
Mountain goats are found in ten of the United States and four Canadian provinces and territories.
To learn how many animals roam the continent, in 2011 I sent a questionnaire to wildlife
managers in each of those fourteen jurisdictions. Based upon their responses and a 2011 report
by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the population totals roughly 100,000
mountain goats, making it one of the continent’s least abundant hoofed animals.
<insert Table 1 about here>
The majority of goats roam coastal mountain ranges from Alaska to Washington.
Smaller numbers dot the Rocky Mountain and Cascade chains and other, isolated mountain
ranges. About half live in British Columbia and another quarter in Alaska.
<insert Table 2 about here>
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many species of North America’s large
mammals suffered staggering population losses. Continental populations of elk, deer,
pronghorn, bison, and most large carnivores were depleted by 90 percent and more. The
mountain goat apparently was a fortunate exception. The protective advantage that goats had
always enjoyed was that their wildland remoteness buffered them from human exploitation. Yet
in recent decades many native herds declined in the southern part of the species’ range. This
transpired even as most ungulate numbers remained stable or increased in response to private and
public conservation efforts. To understand the difference and the mountain goat’s present
conservation circumstances, let’s look at what happened over the previous century.
It seems that improved access to goat ranges took a toll during the 20th Century. Logging
and mining activities, recreational four-wheeling, and snowmobiling may have displaced animals
to less suitable habitat or stressed animals during the environmentally most difficult season in a
42
goat year. But the more pervasive threat was that better vehicle access made hunting easier.
Many populations across southern Alberta and the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of British
Columbia decreased in the 1960s to early 1970s. According to Canadian wildlife authorities,
increased access combined with liberal hunting regulations produced “massive overharvest of
populations.” Similar scenarios occurred elsewhere in the Canadian and U.S. Rockies but
weren’t fully realized until hunter success rates had dropped. The mountain goat may be the only
North American ungulate to have suffered local extirpations through regulated hunting.
How large the loss of former goat numbers, no one really knows. In the mountain goat
stronghold of British Columbia, for example, a government report states that 100,000 animals
may have roamed the province in 1964. By 1977 the population was estimated at 63,000 and by
2011 somewhere between 39,000 and 65,500. The magnitude of declines in British Columbia
and elsewhere are approximations at best. Populations were not rigorously counted during the
1960s and before and what survey data existed lacked a high degree of confidence. That a
general decline occurred across most goat ranges, however, is acknowledged by wildlife
authorities.
Contributing to this erosion of numbers was a poor understanding of the unique life
history traits of the species, including: 1) the difficulty of distinguishing males from females; 2)
low productivity of native goat populations; 3) the additive nature of hunting to other causes of
mortality; 4) behavioral fidelity of goats to their habitat; and 5) the vulnerability of goats to
harvest by humans compared to other hoofed mammals. Like its shaggy white cloak and rock
climbing skills, the above suite of traits also define America’s rock goat, as we shall see.
*****
43
Although they suit the palates of some hunters, mountain goats are not prized as table fare.
Indeed in1907, President Theodore Roosevelt, who hunted throughout the West, said he would
not go after goats for meat because “…the flesh usually affords poor eating, being musky…”
And on the heels of the collapse of most large mammal populations in the U.S., William
Hornaday of the New York Zoological Park wrote in 1914, “This animal is not likely to be
extirpated very soon…” noting that they inhabit inaccessible areas and the flesh is so musky and
dry that it is not palatable.
While wildlife enthusiasts are struck by the beauty of mountain goats’ regal pelage and
fascinating behaviors, it’s the largest horns that entice most hunters. Yet, compared to bighorn
sheep, elk, deer, and moose, this animal sports diminutive headgear. Because the average animal
achieves 90 percent of its eventual horn length during the first three years of life—about the time
they become reproductively active—bragging rights separating the average 4-year-old and 9year-old, for example, are more or less academic and challenging to judge under hunting
conditions.
Most jurisdictions allow either-sex hunting, in large part because goats have what
scientists refer to as limited sexual dimorphism. This means that the subtle differences in
physical appearance between the sexes (both are similarly colored, have beards, and nearly
identical horns) make it hard to separate males from females under field conditions. And
because older males have higher winter mortality than their female counterparts, the sex ratio
among adults becomes skewed toward females. Just by chance, with more adult females in a
population, hunters are more likely to harvest some nannies. As a result, females typically
comprise 20 to 40 percent of the harvest even when hunters desire or are encouraged to shoot
males.
44
Harvesting females can jeopardize the environmental resilience of a herd, and even its
persistence. Females do not produce their first offspring until three to five years of age; they
typically give birth to a single kid; and as much as a third of reproductively mature females do
not bear young at all in a given year. Because of this low reproductive rate, Oreamnos
replenishes lost herd members slowly, making each breeding-age nanny valuable to the herd.
And because their reproductive success increases with age, females can only make significant
contributions to a population by living long lives. After the age of about ten, birth rates among
nannies tend to decline. But those old-timers are no more likely to be chosen as trophies than
prime breeding-age nannies (those five to nine years of age) because horn lengths (and therefore
trophy appeal) increase little beyond three years of age. The similar appearance of the sexes and
low reproductive rate are life history traits that warrant conservative harvest regulations.
Also at fault for falling goat numbers during the 1950s through the 1980s was the
application of principles traditionally used to mange deer, elk, and other ungulates—species with
greater productivity and less susceptibility to over-harvest. Because hunting mostly targets
larger, adult goats, hunter take tends to be additive to natural mortality, which more often claims
kids, yearlings, and the very old and feeble. In other words, hunting removes very few animals
which were bound to die anyway from starvation, predation, accidents, or toothless old-age. The
average age of the remains of twelve goats I found in the Bitterroots was 10.8, significantly older
than the average age (6.0 years) of 123 goats harvested during those three years. The difficulty
in distinguishing the age of goats three or more years old renders all adults, male and female, of
similar trophy status to most hunters.
Furthermore, mountain goats are rigidly faithful to seasonal ranges, especially winter
ranges. Because nursery groups return each fall to optimum areas of winter ranges, this is where
45
numbers of goats are most visible and reliably found. In a long-term study in Idaho, Lonn Kuck
found that as nannies were harvested from prime areas of the Pahsimeroi Range, some remaining
goats from adjacent habitats moved in to occupy the preferred cliff areas. Billies are more
solitary and may be harder for hunters to locate. As a consequence of these conditions,
unsustainable harvests of females pare herds even though biologists and hunters continue to see
similar numbers of goats in favored cliff habitats in the early stages of declines.
Mountain goats are relatively easy to harvest with firearms. Seemingly secure on a pitch
that only they can scale, or wisp of ledge from which to repel a wolf or lion’s challenge, still
leaves them vulnerable to a 200-yard (or longer) rifle shot. Certainly a hunter better have stout
legs and lungs to hunt the mountain goat, but improved vehicle access has rendered some herds
vulnerable to the lazy.
From the Cascade Mountains bordering Lake Chelan, a poignant example illustrates the
acute vulnerability of the animal to modern transport and weapons. A story titled “Rare Sport on
Cliffs” in the December 25, 1892 edition of the New York Times began: “They killed eleven
goats—three billies, five nannies, and three kids. Their skins are on the steamer. They lost six
goats that fell over the cliffs when they were shot.” From pleasure ships and rowboats that plied
Lake Chelan’s waters, tourists and marksmen blasted away at white targets dotting cliffs above
the shorelines of this 55-mile-long gash into the heart of this Washington mountain goat
stronghold. One historical report described the supply of goats as “inexhaustible.” But like
bison slayed from passenger trains, the carnage was unsustainable and only slowed when
Washington established the first restrictions on goat hunting in 1897. Complete closure of all
goat hunting in the state followed in 1925 and continued through 1947. Goat ranges bordering
46
Lake Chelan were again closed to hunting in 1980. During the mid-1980s, 44 goats were
transplanted along the lake’s shorelines to supplement the struggling population.
Even when modest harvest levels are intended, hunting pressure across many goat ranges
can focus on certain groups of goats in a mountain range while other more remote groups escape
much harvest. For example, wildlife managers may set a reasonable harvest quota of say 10
animals for an estimated population of 200 goats that roam a wide swath of mountains. But
much of the harvest may come from just 50 goats that use a section most accessible to hunters,
draining that smaller area of animals in just a few years.
Finally, because they are less numerous and can withstand less hunting than more
abundant and productive ungulates, wildlife management agencies have invested fewer resources
in assessing the status of mountain goat populations. Most surveys to tally numbers are
conducted in winter or early spring when goats are restricted to winter ranges. Surveys from the
ground, like mine in the Bitterroots, afford the best opportunity to classify the age and sex of
observed animals. But it’s impractical to send a biologist or student scientist snowshoeing into
every mountain hideaway where goats eke out a living. So, most assessments of goat herds are
made from the birds-eye view of small aircraft, primarily helicopters. Due to costly air charter
fees, few populations are surveyed annually—most only once every few years—and in the past,
some not all.
So what do wildlife managers learn from these logistically difficult and costly surveys of
mountain goats? Most basic is the number of animals presumed to occupy each survey area and
the ages of animals observed. Based on studies in Alberta, Alaska, and Washington of their
sightabilty (the percentage of animals observed of those actually there), 20 to 40 percent of goats
in any one area are not spotted during survey flights (and maybe half in coastal forests of British
47
Columbia and Alaska). Survey results must be adjusted accordingly to estimate total numbers.
Counts from aircraft are generally limited to separating kids from older goats, so assessing herd
sex ratios or survival of kids to yearling age are not possible.
Biologists use results of surveys repeated across several years to gauge population trends
and set appropriate harvest levels. However, given the year-to-year variability of weather
conditions, and the inherent inaccuracy and imprecision of survey results, wildlife managers
have limited real time knowledge of how populations are faring. This lack of reliable
demographic data has historically produced belated adjustments in harvest quotas to shore up
struggling herds. Because herds are slow to respond to relaxed hunting and seldom display
compensatory growth (increased reproductive rate after herds are reduced, something that deer
and elk herds may do where too many have formerly overused their food supply), goat numbers
may languish at low levels. In some areas of Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and
Washington, local populations have not recovered losses despite more than 20 years of closed
hunting seasons. In such cases, other forms of ongoing human disturbance (such as seismic
testing and helicopter overfights), habitat losses, and cumulative effects are believed to be the
reasons for goat herds failing to rebound.
*****
Following declines across their historical range, mountain goats were transplanted during the
latter half of the 20th Century to bolster or to reestablish herds in Alaska, Idaho, Montana,
Washington, Alberta, and British Columbia. The success rate of these restoration transplants has
not always been stellar. Even when they’ve taken root, goats tend to multiply more slowly than
reintroduced bighorn sheep, elk, or pronghorns.
During the warm Hypsithermal Period that followed retreat of the Pleistocene glaciers,
fossil evidence suggests that goats likewise retreated, or died out, from areas south of their
48
present native range. Due to their high fidelity to native ranges and fondness for rugged, remote
places, goats didn’t colonize isolated mountain “islands”—like the Absarokas, Beartooths,
Snowcrests, and Tobacco Roots in Montana—even though such ranges may contain suitable
habitat. To further expand recreational opportunities of this popular species—both for viewing
and hunting—wildlife managers introduced mountain goats captured from native herds in
Canada and the U.S. to these habitat islands and to six states south of their historical range.
Transplanted goats have readily adapted to their new homes from South Dakota to
Oregon. Relatively mild climates, good range conditions, and few predators have fostered
success of introductions outside historical range. Twenty-one released to Montana’s Crazy
Mountains in the 1940s increased to an observed population of 371 in 2011 while supporting
sport hunting during most years. Other transplants enjoyed a period of rapid expansion, followed
by a period of stabilization as animals fully occupied available habitat, followed by population
decline as goats became limited by food resources, disease, predators, or unknown factors. Such
populations have since persisted at some post-decline level. The stagnation is typified by poor
kid production and survival, but for reasons that are generally unclear.
Data from Idaho indicate that this sequence from transplant to post-decline may occur
over 30 to 40 years, as has been the case with goats transplanted in 1969 to the Palisades
Wilderness Area of eastern Idaho. After at least 12 years of population increases of 20 percent
annually (near the species’ maximum reproductive potential), and sustained hunting and
transplanting of surplus animals to other locations, it plummeted in the 1990s. Herd numbers
remain very low despite sharp reductions in hunting and suspension of removals.
The Palisades exemplifies the high reproductive potential of goats introduced to high
quality habitats. Compared to native populations, nannies introduced to new ranges consistently
49
first give birth at three years of age, have fewer reproductive pauses, and produce twins on
occasion. What propels this early population growth is that most transplant sites are relatively
predator-free and competition for food and space is lax because bighorn sheep are absent.
Introduced goats have flourished in Oregon’s Hell’s Canyon (of Evel Knievel motorcycle fame),
where much of the canyon’s habitat burned in 2007, possibly rejuvenating nutritious forage for
the animals.
Studies suggest that introduced goats can be harvested at a much higher rate, up to 7
percent annually, without depressing numbers. If habitat is expansive or pathways are available
to adjacent mountains, populations continue to expand in size as animals disperse and colonize
additional range. Without traditional ties to their new surroundings, goats brought to Colorado
and Utah have spread like molecules filling a vacuum.
But not all transplants have thrived, especially those in marginal mountain parcels such as
the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness and the Elkhorn and Sapphire Mountains of Montana,
and southern portions of British Columbia and Alberta’s historic mountain goat range. Whether
in native or transplanted populations, goats appear to fare worse in small, isolated areas where
they have fewer places to relocate if habitat conditions worsen.
A few populations have done too well, some would argue, where they have grown and
dispersed into adjacent areas where they may not be wanted. Mountain goats transplanted to
Montana’s Absaroka and Madison Ranges during the 1940s and 1950s began colonizing
northern portions of Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s. Despite considerable harvest
around the park’s perimeter, more than 200 animals inhabited Yellowstone in 2011 with
additional habitat still unoccupied, according to park biologists.
50
And a handful of pioneers have spread as much as 44 miles north into Grand Teton
National Park from where goats were transplanted to Idaho’s Palisades Wilderness two decades
earlier. A lone apparition here, two or three clinging to a granite slab there are seen on occasion
by mountaineers and rangers in the heart of what are called the American Alps. Where they
vanish in winter, no one knows. Likely they remain swallowed up on some wind-racked
escarpment where even their tracks are erased from a canvas the color of goats.
Sightings of nannies with newborns since 2008 suggest that a breeding population has
established in Grand Teton, as in nearby Yellowstone Park. This creates a dilemma for National
Park Service managers because America’s mountain goat is not native to Grand Teton and
Yellowstone. Had colonizing goats originated from pioneering native populations, they would
have been welcome. Instead, they are considered an exotic species—not a natural component of
the native biota. National Park Service policy prescribes that when exotic plant and animal
species find their way into parks: “Control or eradication will be undertaken, where feasible, if
exotic species threaten or alter natural ecosystems; [or] seriously restrict, prey on, or compete
with native populations.” Management planning for Grand Teton’s goats began in 2012.
A previous effort to manage goats in another U.S. national park fueled years of
controversy and polarized public debate. A dozen animals introduced to Washington’s Olympic
Mountains in the late 1920s preceded the establishment of Olympic National Park in 1938. By
1983, an estimated 1,175 animals had colonized all suitable habitats on the Olympic Peninsula,
both within and around the park. By then, botanical studies showed that feeding and dustbathing behavior of goats were damaging some species of rare, endemic plants. This prompted
government officials to initiate a reduction program that removed 407 animals from the park
51
from 1981 to 1989. Others were legally harvested beyond the park’s borders leaving some 389
in the Olympic Mountains when the park’s reduction program ended.
In recent years, Olympic National Park has managed goats under its “Hazard and
Nuisance Animal Plan.” The plan authorized hazing animals from certain popular tourist
areas—goats hooked on tasty treats of an odd kind. As I described in Chapter 5, goats have a
liking for salt—even an obsession that may make them confrontational. Behavior among
Olympic’s bad boys ranged from licking salty backpacks and hikers’ clothes to their greatest
weakness, lapping urine deposited where no outhouses are to be found. This became an
unacceptable risk after a park tourist was fatally gored by an Olympic goat in 2011. Three other
visitors were previously injured by habituated goats in the same area.
Given untold thousands of encounters between goats and people in the U.S. and Canadian
parks, this human fatality in Olympic is a tragic anomaly. It pales compared to deaths from
mountaineering mishaps, heart attacks, drownings, and even lightning strikes over the years. But
a new planning effort began after a 2011 helicopter survey showed that goats were increasing
again in Olympic National Park. It seeks to limit conflicts between mountain goats, people, and
plants by capturing and transplanting some goats elsewhere.
This salt addiction is not unique to Olympic Park. Goats in Montana’s Glacier National
Park also shadow hikers at several popular areas of goat range. Look over your shoulder near
Sperry Chalet or the Hidden Lake Overlook and a brazen billy or nanny may be following in
your tracks. Despite their instinctual avoidance of people, wild animals in protected areas (and
most often adult males) can become aggressive in their pursuit of salt. Just as unattended food
and garbage can habituate bears, the tonic of human sweat and urine can encourage goats to lose
52
their fear. Taking proper precautions or avoiding high risk places are choices that we, not the
wildlife, can rationalize and choose to make.
To date, Olympic National Park is the only well-documented instance of goats adversely
affecting an ecosystem. But not unlike Olympic, goats have accidentally colonized other
national parks in the continental U.S. In 1924, six animals were transported from Alberta to
establish a herd in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. Custer shares a common, fenced boundary
with Mount Rushmore National Memorial, a unit of the National Park Service system. After
arriving at Custer, several escaped their enclosure during their first night of confinement. Goats
have since pioneered suitable habitat throughout the Black Hills, including scrambling with
impunity beneath the chiseled stony stares of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
No control efforts followed, a wildlife official told me, because goat numbers have not exploded
and damaged the national memorial’s environment. A hit with tourists, as at other introduction
sites, Rushmore’s wooly residents rival the popularity of presidents.
Resource management decisions regarding exotic species, particularly one as charismatic
and socially acceptable as the mountain goat, often involve a complicated blend of science,
public opinion, societal values, and agency policy and law. But this can prove thorny
maneuvering as in Colorado’s case. The state’s native bighorn numbers have undergone a
decade-long slide, while introduced goats have dispersed far beyond introduction sites and
pioneered habitats traditionally used by sheep. Meanwhile, managers of Rocky Mountain
National Park worry that pioneering goats may displace or out-compete native bighorns. Since
the 1990s park officials have removed each wayward goat that wandered into the park. The state
of Colorado confronted this by declaring the goat a native species in 1993. The National Park
Service disagrees. Based on an independent review of historical records, goats have not roamed
53
Colorado in at least 200 years, until their introduction from Montana in 1948. To date, the
agencies have cooperated in these removals, a model that may someday be adopted in
Wyoming’s national parks.
54
Chapter 7: Conservation: Local Challenges
Beyond the hazards of severe weather and gravity—environmental constraints by which the
animal has been shaped through the diligent fine-tuning of natural selection—North America’s
mountain goat faces a host of new challenges. All of these are human-caused.
Beginning in the 1970s, concerns that many goat populations were dwindling spawned
investigations of the species’ ecology from Alaska to Montana. For the first time in 1976,
agency scientists and student researchers gathered in Kalispell, Montana, to share their findings
and concerns about the animal at the First International Mountain Goat Symposium. This began
a tradition of convening a biennial meeting (the Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council
Symposium) to share information and report on the status of the mountain goat across its
continental distribution. Thereafter, science began to play a greater role in the species’
management.
It became clear that goats introduced to previously unoccupied habitats often underwent a
boom and bust growth cycle, initially growing rapidly followed by population decline. To shortcircuit anticipated declines, managers have sanctioned annual harvests of 7 to 10 percent by
hunters to hold goat densities below range carrying capacity—an admittedly fuzzy metric. To
provide new herds for recreational hunting was of course the original purpose most transplants
were conceived. The question lingers: Would this boom and bust cycle occur uniformly for all
newly established or reestablished populations? Apparently not, because some introductions
have failed. Where winters are more severe and the most effective predators of goats—wolves
and grizzly bears—are more common, hunting may be unwarranted or need be far more
conservative.
55
As if a different species, most native populations can withstand far less hunter removal
than newly established herds. Across the species’ range, hunting is regulated by issuing limited
numbers of permits on a lottery basis, except in remote areas of Alaska, British Columbia, and
Northwest Territories where hunting pressure is slight or unrestricted hunting accommodates
First Nations’ rights. Permit numbers and allocations are based on population trend data, which
ideally would be collected annually. But gathering population data is constrained by budgets and
logistics. So over the past decade managers have prescribed increasingly conservative harvests,
largely as an upshot of past misjudgments that produced overharvests of goats.
The Montana wildlands where I lived among goats offers just one of many examples.
The nineteen canyons of the northern Bitterroot Range comprise Hunting District 240.
Following excessive harvest and decline of the population, hunting in 240 was closed from 1948
to 1954. After hunting reopened in 1955, Montana issued 75 or more permits each year during
the 1960s and 1970s producing annual harvests of 37 animals—more than 10 percent of the
district’s estimated population of 300 goats. My observations during the mid-1970s suggested
that losses from natural causes doubled that annual mortality rate. Even if every adult female
had produced and successfully raised a kid each year, that would not have offset total annual
losses. In response to plummeting goat numbers and productivity, in 2011only twelve permits
were offered for Hunting District 240 and only two permits in 2012.
Over the past 30 years, wildlife officials have pared back hunting of native populations in
most provinces and states. In the Bob Marshal and Great Bear Wilderness Areas, two other
Montana strongholds of native goats, populations have shrunk by an estimated 85 percent in
recent years and hunting has all but ended. The number of permits to hunt goats in Idaho’s
Pahsimeroi Mountains, where biologist Lonn Kuck documented how excessive harvests had sent
56
that population into a tailspin, was slashed from 20 to 40 annually during the 1970s to four
permits in 2012. And in 1988, Alberta halted hunting of dwindling mountain goats provincewide. As populations slowly recovered in subsequent years, very conservative hunting was
reinstituted in 2001 for this highly popular big game species.
Encouragingly, this conservative pattern demonstrates agencies responding to better data
and our emerging understanding of mountain goat biology. It’s an acknowledgment that herds
can withstand little hunter harvest on top of natural mortality. I’m hopeful that greater
recognition of the animal’s nonconsumptive values has also compelled tighter harvest measures.
Regulations nowadays generally limit annual harvests to one to four percent of native
populations and recognize the particularly vulnerable nature of isolated, small herds. In Alberta,
Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, and Oregon, populations numbering less than 50 individuals
are generally not hunted at all. Washington State recently increased the minimum population
size that can be hunted from 50 to 100. And in many jurisdictions large hunting units have been
subdivided to apportion hunting permits in accordance with judged vulnerability of individual
herds. Management is catching up with the science. The mountain goat’s ecology, sociobiology, and population dynamics are unlike any other North American big game animal—truths
that must inform its conservation.
Maybe more than any other factor, the revelation that breeding age females of this
matriarchal species should be exempted from harvest has been a vital contribution of recent field
studies. In most jurisdictions, harvest of females is discouraged yet not prohibited. Poor sexual
dimorphism of the species—the sexes’ near mirror image—has kept wildlife managers from
requiring harvest of only males.
57
To foster protection of females, I published a paper in 1988. It illustrated in words and
drawings the field markings that are useful to discriminate males from females, as well as four
age classes of mountain goats. Such educational materials have increasingly been provided to
hunters in pamphlets and identification quizzes to curb the shooting of females.
<Insert Drawings of Age/Sex Classes about here>
Sport hunting of goats is acceptable because it provides recreational opportunities for
hunters and economic benefits for hunting guides. And hunters have traditionally been financial
stalwarts in support of wildlife conservation. Yet continental participation in recreational
hunting continues its decades-long slide. According to the 2011 National Survey of Fishing,
Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, only 11.6 million Americans hunted big game out
of 90 million Americans age sixteen and older who participated in recreational activities related
to fish and wildlife.
Unlike many populations of ungulates—and especially those that are relatively predatorfree—goats do not “require” sport hunting to limit their numbers and consequent conflicts with
humans and agriculture. On the contrary, native mountain goats do just fine if they are not
hunted by us. As evidence of this, populations have remained relatively stable in national parks
of the US and Canada.
And this leads to the reality that this North American novelty’s value increasingly lies in
nonconsumptive uses, such as wildlife observation, nature study, and photography. As permits
for hunting goats become increasingly rare, the allure of the species has never been higher. In
Canada’s Banff, Glacier, Jasper, Kluane, Kootenay, Nahanni, Revelstoke, Waterton, and Yoho
parks, spotting goats clinging to cliffs is as much a part of the visitor’s experience as ogling the
stunning scenery that the goats roam. The animal most closely associated with Montana’s
58
Glacier National Park is the mountain goat. Over two million tourists annually seek a chance to
spot and photograph the animal rambling the park’s Pleistocene ice-sculpted ramparts. In
Washington’s North Cascades National Park—where I surveyed populations as a seasonal
employee in 1976—glimpsing this shaggy mountaineer also delights tourists. The area in and
around Klondike Gold Rush National Park and the town of Skagway, Alaska, draws about
800,000 tourists annually, with viewing of glaciers and goats the primary draw. And in Colorado
and Oregon, outdoor clubs devoted to the mountain goat and their alpine habitat are thriving.
*****
In a 2011 survey I asked wildlife biologists and managers across the fourteen states, provinces,
and territories inhabited by mountain goats to list the most urgent conservation and management
needs of the species. The list included more funding for research and for population surveys, but
most often mentioned were measures to protect herds from both habitat and population impacts.
While the realm of the mountain goat remains relatively unchanged, no other large
mammal may be as sensitive to modification of its habitat as this one. The mountain goat is a
habitat specialist. If its habitat is safeguarded from human incursions, it does well where
populations are protected from over-exploitation. Our enterprises that directly degrade and
fragment its domain include mining, logging, energy exploration and development, and
recreational ventures.
Harvesting timber from coastal mountain goat ranges may be the most significant habitat
threat. By intercepting winter snows and nurturing arboreal lichens that goats eat, ancient trees
enable goats to survive beneath their crowns. Without the “umbrella” provided by these oldgrowth tree canopies, goats that have prospered in coastal ranges for generations could literally
be buried beneath maritime snows. “Because goat winter habitat is limited,” concluded a 1989
59
study by the US Forest Service of declining populations in Alaska, “even small areas of habitat
alteration that impinge on these areas can have a disproportionately large effect on the goat
populations concentrated there.”
Beyond degrading areas of habitat, the roads that accompany industrial and recreational
activities bring more people into goat ranges. That makes hunting easier, but associated
disturbance also affects goats in ways we are only beginning to understand. Physiological stress
(which can depress immune system function and burn energy reserves), separation of nannies
and kids, and displacement from preferred areas—especially winter habitats—can threaten the
survival of individual animals and the vitality of herds. Montana goat biologist Gayle Joslin
described such a situation along Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front where seismic exploration
activity was ostensibly responsible for mountain goat population declines.
“…at some unknown but relatively minor level, human disturbance in mountain goat
habitat results in declining goat populations. This has been repeatedly displayed across
North American goat country. …Although not much research has been done on the
effects of stress on goat physiology, researchers have studied it extensively in mountain
sheep and other wildlife. Research from Alberta shows that even if an animal does not
respond outwardly to disturbance, it does not necessarily mean an animal is not
responding internally through increased adrenalin output, raised heart rate, or other
reactions. Research also shows that if stress is repeated or prolonged, resistance to
infection and disease may decrease and reproduction may be impaired or completely
fail.”
Another concern is the upsurge in off-road vehicles and high-powered snowmobiles
penetrating mountain goat ranges. As snow settles and compacts in late winter, snowmobilers
60
like to “high-mark” on mountainsides, sometimes encroaching on goat habitat. Then
snowmobiling can elevate stress and spend calories at a time when winter-weary and pregnant
goats can least afford it.
In addition to these conservation challenges, when I asked wildlife managers to list future
threats to goats, those most often mentioned were recreational and industrial harassment from
motorized equipment, especially helicopter over-flights. Although goats may respond to lowflying airplanes, it’s the sound of approaching helicopters that send these cliff-dwellers into a
panic. After four years of extensive oil and gas exploration along Montana’s Rocky Mountain
Front, that goat population had fallen by 35 percent, largely due to a dramatic drop in kid
production and survival. Gayle Joslin attributed the decline to hundreds of helicopter overflights for seismic testing.
Goats and helicopters mix like water and oil. Throughout their range, they react
frantically to approaching whirlybirds. We don’t know if goats perceive the thundering approach
of a Jet Ranger as some gargantuan eagle, an airborne avalanche, or some other dire threat to
their lives. Watching them scurry to hunker against cliff walls or tremble beneath trees, their
reactions are unmistakably fearful.
We can’t even be sure which disturbances affect goat survival or reproduction most. Or
specifically how metabolic pathways are compromised. Our best scientific efforts surely would
pale in comparison to the reclusive mountaineer just telling us the answers to such matters.
Studies of more amenable research subjects inform us that combinations of offenses invariably
inflict more harm than they do individually, something scientists call “cumulative effects.” The
population declines Gayle Joslin recorded were more evident in an area with a long history of
human-related activities, many involving year-long mechanized access. After seismic activity
61
abated in 1985, the goat population in this area of human disturbance recovered much more
slowly than in an adjacent, relatively pristine area without motorized access, suggesting
disturbances cumulatively diminished the vitality of goat herds.
But helicopter use in goat habitat is not solely a result of energy exploration and
development. Recreational flights into goat ranges of Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon
Territory, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming are a booming industry that encompasses flightseeing tours and transport for heli-skiing and heli-hiking. This explosion of helicopter-based
recreation suggests to me that heli-barbeques and heli-weddings (with goats as invited guests)
are an untapped market for those who can pay. Such intrusions are ironically self-defeating,
degrading the solitude we seek in backcountry retreats. More to the point, they are a menace to
the reclusive mountain goat, particularly during winter and early kid-rearing months. Helicopter
disturbance has been compared to an increase in predation risk. It alters physiological condition,
depresses reproductive success, and even risks injuries to fleeing animals.
A growing body of evidence of these negative effects prompted wildlife scientists to
write a position statement on the subject in 2004. Released by the Northern Wild Sheep and
Goat Council, the statement recommends restrictions on the timing and proximity of helicopter
over-flights in goat ranges. Each mountain goat is an individual. All do not respond the same to
helicopters, or for that matter to other stimuli in their environment. But the pattern is clear.
Although we all use wood products, minerals, and fossil fuel energy to enrich our lives,
we can temper our choices. People can make informed decisions about how and where and to
what extent we alter our environment; and how we impact other life forms with lifestyles far less
flexible than our own. Given the precarious nature of its life lived on the edge, the mountain
goat is deserving of our benevolence.
62
For all the security and calm its chosen haunts would seem to offer, each year less
remains untouched by our pursuit of more resources and playgrounds. I can make the case that
lands where wolverines, hoary marmots, and mountain goats breathe and breed most clearly
define a mountain wilderness. Indeed, the single most effective conservation policy for
sustaining goat herds may be formal designation of wilderness, or at least forbidding motorized
travel in mountain goat range. Such a ban on heli-skiing in portions of Idaho’s Sawtooth
National Recreation Area was instituted in the 1970s and subsequently expanded to protect
wintering mountain goats. In 2002, federal land managers in coordination with the Idaho Fish
and Game Department enacted voluntary winter closures on snowmobiling, skiing, and other
recreational uses in areas where goats were subject to disturbance. Seasonal closures such as
these may provide goats the margin of security needed to persist in areas formerly frequented
only rarely by people. In the dead of winter, goats have nowhere else to go; people do.
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Chapter 8: The Global Challenge
While some threats to species may be regulated and ameliorated at the local level, others may
not. A growing global challenge now confronts alpine environments and their wild residents,
including the mountain goat.
The evidence is undeniable that our planet is warming, atmospheric accumulation of
greenhouse gases is largely responsible, and Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity are already
suffering the effects. These realities are well-documented in countless scientific publications and
summarized in comprehensive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United Nations to assess current scientific,
technical, and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by
human activity, its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences, and options for
adapting to these climate-caused effects. Thousands of experts in climate science and related
fields from 120 countries contribute to the panel’s assessments.
Although some consequences of the planet’s warming may bring welcome changes on
local scales—most notably for those who aren’t fans of parkas and mukluks—negative
consequences will predominate. For example, warmer and longer growing seasons and the
fertilization effect of rising CO2 levels will accelerate growth rate of plants, potentially boosting
crop yields and increased consumption of CO2 (a major greenhouse gas and fuel for
photosynthesis). However these benefits will be offset by increasingly variable precipitation
patterns, withering heat and drought, geographical shifts in food production zones, and plagues
of agricultural pests.
Our warming climate is impacting biota from the poles to equator. But it’s at the highest
latitudes and altitudes that the changes are most dramatic. Annual temperatures of Polar Regions
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and the arctic alpine are climbing at triple the rate of other regions of the globe. Conditions have
always been most frigid at these geographic extremes, and by definition their life forms are coldadapted.
The whitebark pine is one such species adapted to ice-box temperatures and blistering
winds that shape the upper treeline across much of the mountain goat’s interior range. Yet from
Colorado to British Columbia the tree is dying. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, almost
half of whitebark pines are now dead. More broadly, vast tracts of Rocky Mountain spruce and
pine forests have become eerie landscapes of arboreal skeletons after dying orange needles fall
from gray, lifeless limbs. Their ongoing demise has been traced to increased pine blister rust and
mountain pine beetles formerly held in check by the winter deep freeze. Temperatures are no
longer cold enough long enough to beat back the pests that attack and kill trees that are
increasingly weakened by warm, dry summers. Dead forests become tinderboxes for wildfires
that have been raging across western wildlands as the wildfire season has lengthened by weeks.
Such effects not only destroy commercial forests, they accelerate the addition of CO2 to the
atmosphere and change ecosystems in numerous ways and more rapidly than many species can
adapt.
It’s a big deal to the Clark’s nutcracker which makes a steady diet of the whitebark’s pine
nuts, and also to threatened grizzly bear populations in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho who
relish the cones as a high-energy, pre-denning food source. The bears get them not by climbing
trees, but by raiding winter food caches painstakingly stored by red squirrels. Additional
reverberations ripple throughout the alpine zone’s web of life from the loss of this single species
of tree.
65
Warmer conditions are expected to advance phenological events such as flowering and
fruiting of plants demanding species dependent on them to reset migration timing, breeding, and
other biological cycles. The transformation is altering distributions of whole plant communities,
changes scientists have been measuring on the ground and with the aid of satellite imagery in
recent years. Trends over the past three or four decades show an accelerating expansion of
species’ geographic range boundaries towards the poles or to higher elevations by progressive
development of new local populations. Concurrently, opportunistic, weedy and/or highly mobile
species are invading new areas, especially where native species are declining. Ecosystems will
gain some species and lose others with consequent reorganization of community relationships
and food webs.
The Earth has warmed before, but it’s the rate of temperature rise that worries observers.
In many regions the climate threat promises to overtake habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution,
human exploitation, and the spread of invasive species and disease as the preeminent threat to
biodiversity. As the warming continues more species will be put to the test: can they adapt as
rapidly as the changing weather?
*****
Given this bleak picture of an over-heating planet, what might the future hold for America’s
shaggy alpinist and his mountain stronghold? A look at the past may help. During the
Hypsithermal—a 6,000-year post-Pleistocene stretch when temperatures averaged some 4
degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the present—mountain goat populations died out south of Idaho,
Montana, and Washington. Glaciers in the Cascades and Rockies melted, treeline marched up
mountainsides, and alpine species receded northward. These same changes in ice and species’
distributions are now being repeated as the size of the alpine zone effectively shrinks.
66
According to the IPCC’s 2007 report, climate-change models suggest an average 2
degree Fahrenheit increase in global mean temperature over the next 50 years. The change will
be far greater near the poles and at high elevations. Such warming is predicted to force a shift of
ecosystems nearly 1,000 feet higher in elevation and 100 miles farther north. The IPCC also
forecasts that more than 50 percent of the alpine-tundra ecosystems will eventually disappear as
subalpine forests advance up mountains.
Most of us know from media reports that from the Himalayas to the Alps, and the Andes
to the Rockies, continental glaciers are in retreat. These iconic features of the mountain goat’s
domain are destined to become relics and then memories of the Earth’s former, cooler past—a
bleak bellwether of the heating’s effects.
From a total count of 150 in 1850, Montana’s famous glaciers in Glacier National Park
had shrunk to 25 in 2012. Scientists predict all will have melted away between 2020 and 2030.
Glacier will become un-Glacier or formerly-Glacier Park, and the trend is similar throughout the
mountain goat’s range. The downstream effects will include diminished water flows in summer
and fall, jeopardizing water-dependent wildlife, like Glacier’s native cutthroat trout.
<insert paired images of glacial retreat about here (Jackson and Shepard glaciers>
The full impact of glacial retreat on Glacier Park's mountain ecosystem is not fully
known, but at least one aquatic species already faces extinction. As its name implies, the
meltwater stonefly (Lednia tumana) prefers the coldest, most sensitive alpine stream habitats
directly downstream of disappearing glaciers, permanent snowfields, and springs in the park.
Recorded only from Glacier National Park and nearby areas, and with a distribution so
dependent on frigid waters, concerned scientists sought protection of the meltwater stonefly as an
endangered species. In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled the insect warrants
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protection under the Endangered Species Act. However, the fate of higher priority plants and
animals (those at greater risk of extinction) needed attention first; so the stonefly joined 259
other species on a waiting list. While awaiting consideration for listing, these candidate species
receive no statutory protection.
Loss of the meltwater stonefly may seem inconsequential: a bug in the water that most of
us have never and will never see. But it’s not alone in its icewater environment. “The real takehome message is that we really aren’t just dealing with one single species here. We’re dealing
with a whole ecosystem of interest: a very rare ecosystem that is dependent on very cold and
permanent water,” notes Joe Giersch. An aquatic entomologist at the U.S. Geological Survey,
Giersch has been studying Glacier Park’s isolated alpine streams for fifteen years and found
additional species that appear endemic there as well. These aquatic invertebrates are predicted to
lose 80 percent of their habitat as glaciers melt and snowpack recedes.
In their own way, goats rely on this water too. Although future precipitation patterns are
sketchier to predict than the trajectory of the temperature, warming and shortening winters will
see more precipitation as rain than snow. Fading glaciers and snowfields will shrivel dependable
water sources for growing the most nutritious plants. Recent research by biologist Kevin White
and his colleagues showed that two environmental factors dominated survival of Alaskan
mountain goats. Total snowfall in winter exerted the strongest effect. As described in this
book’s earlier chapters, food scarcity and the physical challenges of living in deep snow test
wintering goats throughout their geographic range.
Of secondary importance, White found that summer temperatures indirectly influence
survival during the following winter. And this is where alpine meltwaters come in. Cool
summers prolong emergence of herbaceous plants at the edge of slowly receding snowlines.
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Early phenological growth stages of plants are less lignified, meaning they’re more digestible
and therefore promote higher weight gains in animals. Recent research on the mountain goat’s
relative, the European chamois, found that weights of yearlings were strongly related to growing
season temperatures. Over 16 years of study, yearling weights declined as spring and summer
temperatures increased. Just as cool summers prolong diet quality of Alaskan goats—boosting
weight gains and fat for winter living, which enhance survival—slow-release meltwaters from
the receding snowpack irrigate the lush grazing gardens of the chamois and the goat. And in a
species whose young are already disadvantaged by small size in winter, good summer nutrition is
important for milk production and growth of kid goats. The good news is that given their
generalist diet, mountain goats will likely fare better than feeding specialists that share their
warming environment.
Then again, goats show intolerance to summer heat, often bedding in shade and on or
near residual snow. Idaho wildlife biologist Dale Toweill expresses concern for the mountain
goat’s future in a state where little alpine habitat already exists, and some populations occupy
suitably rugged habitat at lower elevations—as they do in South Dakota and parts of Oregon.
It’s probably no accident that at the southern extreme of its present distribution, Colorado’s
introduced animals roam the highest elevations of any living mountain goats. Were Colorado’s
peaks 3,000 to 4,000 feet lower, as in Idaho and Montana, could the shaggy beast persist in our
rapidly warming world?
*****
Gazing at distant peaks, some might conclude that such bleak and barren blocks of rock are
lifeless or at least support no life of consequence. Yet, a tenacious assemblage of cold-adapted
69
biota eke out an existence where summers are measured as mere bursts of vitality sandwiched
between the ends and beginnings of a crystalline hush.
One alpine neighbor of the mountain goat may serve as a biological indicator of the rising
heat. The American pika, also known as the rock rabbit or cony, is North America’s diminutive
relative of the rabbits and hares. This quarter-pound hoarder survives six-month winters feasting
on haystacks of vegetation that she cuts and stores under boulders blanketing subalpine and
alpine slopes. As long as she isn’t a slacker and stockpiles enough fodder, she feasts
comfortably beneath an insulating quilt of snow.
Although the densely-furred pika is sensitive to warm summer temperatures, she
behaviorally compensates. As the days heat up she avoids thermal stress by retreating to cooler
microclimates beneath boulders and talus. But as alpine temperatures have risen some 4 degrees
over the past 50 years, it’s the associated changing pattern of precipitation that concerns most
pika biologists. As declining snowfall fails to accumulate to depths that insulate their subnivian
sanctuaries, pikas may fare poorly during the winter months—and most notably at lower
altitudes where winter snowpack is often most skimpy. Some low elevation populations of pikas
inhabiting Great Basin mountain ranges of Nevada and Oregon have vanished in the past
century, while those surveyed at higher elevations are generally doing well. Ironically, “global
warming” might unduly subject pikas to “cold” temperature stress as their protective winter
blanket wears thin in a warming world.
The animal whose geographic range most closely overlaps the mountain goat’s has
chosen a different lifestyle than the pika. While eating all that she harvests from May to
September, the hoary marmot impersonates Rip Van Winkle burrowed beneath boulders and
snow for the rest of the year. She amasses belly rolls of fat to fuel her long hibernation demands.
70
If all goes well, she’ll emerge with adequate reserves to breed and raise a litter during the short
season of renewal.
Studies in Colorado of the closely related yellow-bellied marmot show that hibernation
duration has shortened and marmots are growing bigger—both observations attributed to
warming. The more northerly distributed hoary marmots, besides having a thick coat of dark fur
that readily absorbs solar energy and restricts heat loss, have no sweat glands and cannot pant to
dispel body heat. As a result, their body temperature increases with the external air temperature.
Add to this the insulation of accumulating body fat and it is obvious that hot summer days do the
marmot no favor. To escape such weather, hoary marmots take refuge underground—sometimes
for days—which counters the foraging advantages of lengthening growing seasons.
Hibernating in deep winter burrows, marmots may prove more physiologically tolerant of
the changing alpine climate than the pika, yet still be tested in other ways. As high elevations
warm and dry, the nutritious foods they require may become scarce as summers lengthen, and
meltwaters run out earlier. Successful marmots may focus on shrinking green meadows, thus
putting competitive pressure on populations.
The carnivorous counterpart of the mountain goat—at least in grit and geographic
distribution—is the wolverine. Besides 30 pounds of boundless audacity, the wolverine’s
specializations—thick coat, huge feet, and fearless attitude—enable it to endure the Frigidaire
months of America’s wildest wildlands, much like the mountain goat. And like the goat, its
historic range spanned the northern Rockies and Cascades, but unregulated killing by humans
during the 20th Century eliminated wolverines from much of their southern distribution. In
response to more conservative trapping regulations, perhaps 300 wolverines now share the
contiguous U.S. range of the mountain goat.
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Contrary to the goat’s sedentary winter lifestyle, wolverines are high-energy carnivores
that seem to relish covering immense tracks of terrain to find the next meal in a landscape that’s
starkly devoid of life half the year. While goats seem bound to summer snow for
thermoregulation and its meltwater irrigation of lush vegetation, wolverines depend on deep
snowpack that persists into May. Females produce two or three kits in late winter in elaborate
natal dens they excavate five or more feet deep in stable snow. In these high mountain nurseries,
mothers nurture their young for several weeks, sheltered from the outside cold and would-be
predators.
Persistent snow is an invariant necessity of their environment for reproduction and for
caching and preserving food for leaner times. On top of other threats to their conservation, the
warming climate compelled conservationists to petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to
protect the wolverine under the Endangered Species Act. Just as it seemed the pika might be the
first mammalian casualty of climate change to be listed as federally threatened—and the
meltwater stonefly the first invertebrate—the wolverine was relegated in 2010 to the list of
candidate species. Although agreeing that the wolverine warranted Endangered Species Act
protection in the contiguous United States, the agency concluded that it was of lesser risk of
extinction than other candidate species demanding the agency’s limited resources for rulemaking
and recovery plan implementation. Then, in compliance with a litigation settlement, in January
2013 the agency proposed Endangered Species Act protection for the wolverine in the Lower 48
states. But federal officials made clear they won’t use the animal’s threatened status as a means
to regulate greenhouse gases blamed for accelerating climate change. The George W. Bush
administration placed a similar caveat on the conditions of listing the polar bear as a threatened
species in 2008.
72
So much about the future of these and other alpine species is uncertain, completely
uncharted biological territory. Answers are elusive about how warming will affect plants and
animals and, indeed, we likely don’t know all the relevant questions to ask. Some species like
the ermine, snowshoe hare, and white-tailed ptarmigan rely on cryptic coloration to enhance their
hunting prowess or as defense against becoming prey. Each replaces its summer fur or feathers
in fall with a camouflaged dress of winter white. As winters shorten, can these species’
biological calendars reset successfully to delay morphing to white in autumn and yet accelerate
molting to summer attire earlier in spring? How many other species face similar conundrums,
constrained by the rate at which their bodies and behavior can adapt?
*****
It’s unclear if the moderating climate may increase predation risk should goats spend more time
in forested habitat. Or might changes in parasite loads, life cycles, and their transmission vectors
bode poorly for the mountain goat? As in the case of the marmot, a warming environment may
effectively contract the size of the goat’s late summer-fall habitat. With an upward shift in
treeline, mountain goats may move to higher elevations, effectively sequestered on shrinking
islands in the sky.
Altered habitats, in combination with other troubles discussed in the previous chapter,
could conspire to pare numbers and predispose herds to small population effects. Many
transplanted populations began with only ten to fifteen founder animals, and many isolated
native herds number less than 50 individuals. Tiny populations are at greater risk of unusual
mortality events, but also inbreeding depression stemming from limited genetic variation—
already a genetic trademark of Oreamnos based on recent molecular studies. In this species
73
bound to steep country and not prone to dispersing, these cumulative effects could diminish
viability of populations.
While managing harvest and human disturbance requires herd-specific plans,
conservation of mountain goats must also include a broader, landscape approach. To
accommodate outbreeding via the random dispersing individual demands we must conserve
connecting routes between potentially isolated “population islands.” But ultimately, remedying
climate change and other threats to alpine species requires constraining human resource
consumption, especially the burning of fossil fuels. Although our species is adaptable and we
may muddle our way through if we fail to reverse the climate trend, we will find a planet
impoverished of life forms a more demanding and less vibrant place to live.
*****
Despite the challenges to its wellbeing, the mountain goat thrills wildlife enthusiasts across its
U.S. and Canadian range. I count myself among the fortunate who have spent memorable days
among these shaggy mountaineers. One August morning in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains
captured the wonder of the animal’s lofty realm. Beyond my perch dividing two glacier-gouged
canyons, a broad cirque basin sprawled in the yawning shadow of two majestic peaks. Through
binoculars and tripod-mounted spotting scope, I scanned sweeps of granite, flowered gardens,
and melting snowdrifts for the Old Man of the Mountains. Rewarding my squinting, a display of
wildlife burst from that grand mosaic.
“Eeeeek,” a pika announced her presence from a sunny balcony, then returned to
stockpiling hay for the upcoming winter. Grey-crowned rosy finches flicked in and out of cracks
in cliffs where they may have raised another year’s brood of chicks. A half mile distant, a dark
object caught my eye. Popping like a periscope from a jumble of boulders, a wolverine came
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bounding my way. Like a game of hide and seek, he would navigate hidden pathways then
reappear ever closer to appraise his intended prey. One of the hoary marmots spotted the wouldbe assassin. He whistled a high-pitched alarm to his less vigilant companions who were
cavorting on snowbanks or grazing glacier lilies. When the hunter materialized within striking
range, the ten-pound rodents vanished as if swallowed by the mountain. After a brief
investigation, the wolverine scaled an escarpment as steep as a cow’s face. Faster than seemed
possible, he was out of sight.
As I watched this drama unfold, a swarm of lady bugs swirled around me. Some crawled
on my legs and arms. One nipped my neck as if mistaking the green parka-clad intruder for an
oversized aphid. Surveying all this from a wedge of granite encircled by pink-petaled heather
and yellow-plumed groundsels was a lone billy goat. Like a benign ruler of a magic kingdom,
maybe he, like me, regarded everything in perfect order on his mountain.
To me, the mountain goat is the alpine ecosystem’s superstar, emblematic of the wildest
of America’s wildlands. Why goats sometimes display an irruptive nature and wandering
tendencies when we’ve plopped them in a new home is unclear to those who study such things.
This nature demonstrates ecological plasticity in the species—far more innate flexibility than we
see in most native populations that have been anchored on the same piles of rocks for hundreds
of generations. While we still have much to learn about this enigmatic beast of the peaks, its
paradoxical behavior offers hope that the mountain goat will persevere despite the insults we
inflict on its environment. But that’s no excuse for indifference, insensitivity, or inaction. Only
our benevolence and active stewardship can ensure that future generations of wide-eyed admirers
may marvel at the American mountain goat’s life on the rocks.
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Epilogue
Only by spending intense time can you know and develop real intimacy with a place. In so
doing, you begin to discover features, relations, and worth that casual visitors seldom see. The
place—whether a Midwest marsh or New England woodlot, coastal estuary or headland, prairie
potholes or desert canyons—then becomes part of you and you part of it. This connection is the
germ and nourishment of conservation passion, not merely half-hearted advocacy.
My time in the Bitterroots cut a deep swath in my person. That wedge of the mountain
goat’s realm became a kindred domicile. Besides the grand features named on USGS maps,
smaller folds and twists in the landscape earned their own names that lodged in my lexicon: Cave
Canyon, Maybilly Cliffs, and Nixon’s Nose became cousins of the grand peaks that geographers
had coined Castle Crag, Sky Pilot, and the Heavenly Twins.
This familiarity fondly endures nearly four decades after closing my camp in Fred Burr
Canyon. Since then, fires have swept timbered slopes, thickets have replaced abandoned beaver
ponds only to be cropped by more beaver, and generations of goats have come and gone. Yet the
mesmerizing complexity and spirit of the land lives on. A sign in the gym where I exercise
reads, “If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?” So too, we must nurture the
mountain to nurture the mountain goat.
This is only to say that all life is a product of the land, something wildlife ecologist Aldo
Leopold illustrated so eloquently in his writings a half century and more ago. The land, weather,
and DNA have conspired in bearing a bounty of life so diverse that each year field biologists
catalogue “new” species, even as others become destined for the boneyard of the extinct. Some
varieties are so beguiling, so reminiscent of ourselves in form or behavior, or so awe-inspiring in
the feats they perform that in admiration we elevate them above others in our value system. In
76
that respect the mountain goat does us double duty. It recreates us spiritually, but also serves as
protector—if our conservation ethic prevails—of a tapestry of species that share its high-country
home.
Over the millennia, natural selection—the maestro of how life forms have come to be—
has orchestrated sinew and snow and gravity and grit into a masterpiece: a beast of rock in wool,
our American mountain goat. Every facet of its being shouts that it wants just to live high and
free and solitary. And it will, if we but let it.
77
Acknowledgements
Although the seed remained dormant for many years, writing this book is something I’d always
known I would do. That seed was the animal itself and the way time among them enriched my
education and launched my career. My graduate studies so long ago were mentored by Bart
O’Gara, Phil Wright, Bob Ream and others. My time in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area
firmly planted my boots and my heart in the science and the art of wildlife biology, helping me
understand both the scope and importance of the occupation. But the nourishment for the writing
came from the growing struggle the mountain goat and so many other species face in this humandominated world.
Any book project is a collaborative effort, even if but one author’s name appears on the
cover. Several colleagues were kind enough to review drafts of the work. I thank Douglas
Chadwick, Steeve Côté, Marco Festa-Bianchet, Gayle Joslin, Jim Peek, Mike Thompson, Erik
Beever, and Andrew Smith for their advice and constructive comments. Although we met long
after the years when I lived among mountain goats, my wife Diana knows better than anyone
how important this project was to me. Her suggestions, patience, and love throughout the
writing and editing process are invisibly stamped throughout the book.
I also thank the wildlife biologists and managers from western Canada and the US who
answered my questions, provided reports, publications, and discussion, and offered their
encouragement with this project. I am grateful to my editor, Jessica d’Arbonne, that the
University Press of Colorado took a chance on a project about a relatively unknown species and
accorded the mountain goat and its conservation a larger following.
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Suggested Reading
Beever, E.A., and J. Belant, Editors. 2011. Ecological consequences of climate change:
mechanisms, conservation, and management. CRC Press (Taylor and Francis Group),
Boca Raton, FL.
Brandborg, S.M. 1955. Life history and management of the mountain goat in Idaho. Idaho
Wildlife Bulletin 2: 1–142.
Chadwick, D.H. 1983. A beast the color of winter. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.
Côté, S.D., and M. Festa-Bianchet. 2003. Mountain goat, Oreamnos americanus. Pages 1061–
1075 in Wild mammals of North America: Biology, management, and conservation. Eds.
G.A. Feldhammer, B. Thompson, and J. Chapman. John Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore, MD.
Festa-Bianchet, M., and S.D. Côté. 2008. Mountain goats: Ecology, behavior, and conservation
of an alpine ungulate. Island Press, Washington, DC.
Gonzalez-Voyer, A, K.G. Smith, and M. Festa-Bianchet. 2003. Dynamics of hunted and
unhunted mountain goat populations. Wildlife Biology 9: 213–218.
Houston, D.B., E.G. Schreiner, B.B. Moorhead. 1994. Mountain goats in Olympic National
park: Biology and management of an introduced species. US National Park Service
Scientific Monograph NPS/NROLYM/NRSM-94/25.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2007. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report,
Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the
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